Building a Galactic Scale Gravitational Wave Detector

Gravitational wave observations are one of the most exciting and fastest growing fields of astronomy. One major step forward occurred in 2023, when pulsar timing arrays around the world announced evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave background in the nanohertz regime. Pulsar timing arrays use high-precision timing of millisecond pulsars throughout the Milky Way to form a Galactic Scale Gravitational Wave Detector, capable of detecting these very long period waves. In this talk, we’ll introduce pulsar timing, discuss the painstaking process of building a PTA dataset, and share some of our recent results.