Source anisotropies and pulsar timing arrays

Abstract

Pulsar timing arrays (PTA) hunt for gravitational waves (GW) by searching for the correlations that GWs induce in the time-of-arrival residuals from different pulsars. If the GW sources are of astrophysical origin, then they are located at discrete points on the sky. However, PTA data are often modeled, and subsequently analyzed, via a "standard Gaussian ensemble". That ensemble is obtained in the limit of an infinite density of vanishingly weak, Poisson-distributed sources. In this paper, we move away from that ensemble, to study the effects of two types of "source anisotropy". The first (a), which is often called "shot noise", arises because there are $N$ discrete GW sources at specific sky locations. The second (b) arises because the GW source positions are not a Poisson process, for example, because galaxy locations are clustered. Here, we quantify the impact of (a) and (b) on the mean and variance of the pulsar-averaged Hellings and Downs correlation. For conventional PTA sources, we show that the effects of shot noise (a) are much larger than the effects of clustering (b).

Final published version: 15 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The impact of large-scale galaxy clustering on the variance of the Hellings-Downs correlation: theoretical framework
• Measuring anisotropies in the PTA band with cross-correlations
• Mitigating cosmic variance in the Hellings-Downs curve: a Cosmic Microwave Background analogy
• Statistics of the supermassive black hole gravitational wave background anisotropy
• Dissecting the nanohertz gravitational wave sky: Frequency-correlated anisotropy induced by eccentric supermassive black hole binaries
• The impact of large-scale galaxy clustering on the variance of the Hellings-Downs correlation: numerical results
• Anisotropy of Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Background and Source Clustering from Supermassive Binary Black Holes Based on Cosmological Simulation
• Finite Populations & Finite Time: The Non-Gaussianity of a Gravitational Wave Background