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Nanohertz gravitational wave astronomy during SKA era: An InPTA perspective

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Abstract

Decades long monitoring of millisecond pulsars, which exhibit highly stable rotational periods in pulsar timing array experiments is on the threshold of discovering nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background. This paper describes the Indian pulsar timing array (InPTA) experiment, which employs the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) for timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars for this purpose. We highlight InPTA’s observation strategies and analysis methods, which are relevant for a future PTA experiment with the more sensitive Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope. We show that the unique multi-sub-array multi-band wide-bandwidth frequency coverage of the InPTA, provides dispersion measure estimates with unprecedented precision for PTA pulsars, e.g., \(\sim 2 \times 10^{-5}\) pc cm\(^{-3}\) for PSR J1909-3744. Configuring the SKA-low and SKA-mid as two and four sub-arrays, respectively, it is shown that comparable precision is achievable, using observation strategies similar to those pursued by the InPTA, for a larger sample of 62 pulsars, requiring about 26 and 7 h per epoch for the SKA-mid and the SKA-low telescopes, respectively. We also review the ongoing efforts to develop PTA-relevant general relativistic constructs that will be required to search for nanohertz gravitational waves from isolated super-massive black hole binary systems like blazar OJ 287. These efforts should be relevant to pursue persistent multi-messenger gravitational wave astronomy during the forthcoming era of the SKA telescope, the thirty meter telescope, and the next-generation event horizon telescope.

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Notes

  1. https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-O3aCatalog/index.php.

  2. http://ipta4gw.org/.

  3. It may be noted that large European array for pulsars (LEAP, Bassa et al. 2016) also uses a phased array of multi-element telescopes, but these form a subset of European pulsar timing array experiment, which is largely based on single dish observations. Another interferometer, which contributes data to European pulsar timing array experiment is the Westerbok synthesis radio telescope. Recently, the MeerTime experiment (Bailes et al. 2016a) has started collecting data with MeerKat, which is also an interferometer. It may be noted that these telescopes have not been used as sub-arrays unlike the uGMRT.

  4. Dispersion measure is defined as the integral of the column density of electrons over the line-of-sight to the pulsar.

  5. https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~sransom/presto/.

  6. http://sigproc.sourceforge.net/.

  7. http://psrchive.sourceforge.net/.

  8. http://dspsr.sourceforge.net/.

  9. https://github.com/abhisrkckl/pinta.

  10. https://github.com/ymaan4/RFIClean.

  11. https://github.com/chowdhuryaditya/gptool.

  12. https://github.com/kkma89/dmcalc.git.

  13. https://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/pulsar/psrcat/.

  14. https://github.com/pennucci/PulsePortraiture.

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Acknowledgements

This work is carried out by InPTA, which is part of the International pulsar timing array consortium. We thank the staff of the GMRT who made our observations possible. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. BCJ, PR, AS, SD, LD and YG acknowledge the support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project identification # RTI4002. BCJ and YG acknowledge support from the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project # 12-R &D-TFR-5.02-0700. AS is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant No. 11988101.

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Correspondence to Bhal Chandra Joshi.

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This article is part of the Special Issue on “Indian Participation in the SKA”

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Joshi, B.C., Gopakumar, A., Pandian, A. et al. Nanohertz gravitational wave astronomy during SKA era: An InPTA perspective. J Astrophys Astron 43, 98 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-022-09869-w

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