Events

"The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves
15 Year Dataset"

For the past 15 years the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has been constructing and monitoring a pulsar timing array to detect and study gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies. By tracking the arrival times of radio pulses from 68 pulsars in the Milky Way over 15 years, NANOGrav has now found evidence for a stochastic background of gravitational waves, with the distinctive correlated timing deviations predicted by general relativity. The spectral characteristics of the background agree with expectations for a population of inspiraling (but not yet coalescing) supermassive black hole binaries, with masses of approximately 10^8–10^9 Msun. However, alternative cosmological hypotheses cannot be ruled out. This talk presents the search for gravitational waves in the NANOGrav 15-year data set, and discusses future prospects.