A galactic scale gravitational wave observatory Seminar

Timing an array of pulsars could result in the detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background, most likely resulting from an ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries, and is already constraining models for galaxy formation and the tension of cosmic strings. Pulsar timing arrays are also sensitive to continuous and burst gravitational wave sources. I will describe the current PTAs, in particular NANOGrav (the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) and give an overview of the observational strategies and detection algorithms used. I will describe the dramatic gains in sensitivity that are expected from discoveries of many new millisecond pulsars, more sensitive instrumentation, improved detection algorithms, and international collaboration and discuss the likely time to gravitational wave detection with pulsars under various scenarios.