Limits on the strength of individual gravitational wave sources using high-cadence observations of PSR B1937+21

Abstract

We present the results of a search for gravitational waves (GWs) from individual sources using high cadence observations of PSR B1937+21. The data were acquired from an intensive observation campaign with the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank, between June 2011 and May 2013. The almost daily cadence achieved, allowed us to be sensitive to GWs with frequencies up to $4.98\times 10^{-6}\mathrm{Hz}$, extending the upper bound of the typical frequency range probed by Pulsar Timing Arrays. We used observations taken at three different radio frequencies with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in order to correct for dispersion measure effects and scattering variances. The corrected timing residuals exhibited an unmodeled periodic noise with an amplitude $150\mathrm{ns}$ and a frequency of $3.4{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. As the signal is not present in the entire data set, we attributed it to the rotational behaviour of the pulsar, ruling out the possibilities of being either due to a GW or an asteroid as the cause. After removing this noise component, we placed limits on the GW strain of individual sources equaling to $h_{\mathrm{s}}=1.53\times 10^{-11}$ and $h_{\mathrm{s}}=4.99\times 10^{-14}$ at $10^{-7}\mathrm{Hz}$ for random and optimal sources locations respectively.

One typo in the abstract corrected; 8 pages, figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• A glitch in the millisecond pulsar J0613-0200
• Detection and localization of single-source gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Improving timing sensitivity in the microhertz frequency regime: limits from PSR J1713$+$0747 on gravitational waves produced by super-massive black-hole binaries
• The Gravitational Wave Universe Toolbox: A software package to simulate observation of the Gravitational Wave Universe with different detectors
• Cosmic variance in the nanohertz gravitational wave background
• Detecting nanohertz gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Extending the frequency reach of pulsar timing array based gravitational wave search without high cadence observations
• Single-Source Gravitational Wave Limits from the J1713+0747 24-hr Global Campaign
• Iterative time-domain method for resolving multiple gravitational wave sources in Pulsar Timing Array data
• Parameter-Estimation Biases for Eccentric Supermassive Binary Black Holes in Pulsar Timing Arrays: Biases Caused by Ignored Pulsar Terms
• Upper limits on microhertz gravitational waves from supermassive black-hole binaries using PSR J1909-3744 data from the second IPTA data release