Pulsar Timing and its Application for Navigation and Gravitational Wave Detection

Abstract

Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from testing theories of gravity to detecting gravitational waves. Also an external reference system suitable for autonomous space navigation can be defined by pulsars, using them as natural navigation beacons, not unlike the use of GPS satellites for navigation on Earth. By comparing pulse arrival times measured on-board a spacecraft with predicted pulse arrivals at a reference location (e.g. the solar system barycenter), the spacecraft position can be determined autonomously and with high accuracy everywhere in the solar system and beyond. We describe the unique properties of pulsars that suggest that such a navigation system will certainly have its application in future astronautics. We also describe the on-going experiments to use the clock-like nature of pulsars to "construct" a galactic-sized gravitational wave detector for low-frequency (f_GW ~1E-9 - 1E-7 Hz) gravitational waves. We present the current status and provide an outlook for the future.

30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Vol 63: High Performance Clocks, Springer Space Science Reviews

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Observability of Dark Matter Substructure with Pulsar Timing Correlations
• The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: The $4.5$-year data release and the noise and stochastic signals of the millisecond pulsar population
• The ultracool helium-atmosphere white dwarf companion of PSR J0740+6620?
• Charting the Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Sky with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• nazgul: A statistical approach to gamma-ray burst localization. Triangulation via non-stationary time-series models
• Evolution implications of neutron star magnetic fields: inferred from pulsars and cyclotron lines of HMXBs
• Implications of pulsar timing arrays for Gauss-Bonnet Inflation
• Timing Gravity with Pulsars in the Strong Field