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The University of Southampton
STAG Research Centre

Gravity seminar - Maura McLaughlin Seminar

Time:
12:00 - 13:00
Date:
2 May 2013
Venue:
Building 54, Room 7C

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Wynn Ho at wynn.ho@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

A galactic scale gravitational wave observatory

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.

Speaker information

Maura McLaughlin, West Virginia University. Department of Physics and Astronomy

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