Speaker
Description
The main objective of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) is the regular monitoring of several tens of millisecond pulsars in the radio band in order to detect dynamic perturbations of the space-time. To date, pulsar networks are the only way to detect gravitational-wave (GW) radiation in the nanohertz frequency range. The most commonly considered source of metric perturbations at these frequencies is the GW background generated by the ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries, which are expected to be formed in the centres of galaxies. I will summarise the 25 years of work of the European pulsar timing array (EPTA), which collects pulsar data from the five largest radio telescopes in Europe. Details of the pulsar timing data processing, as well as the most up-to-date methods of astrophysical signal detection against correlated interference will be provided. At the end of the talk, I will discuss the signal and its characteristic features found in the data of all three regional PTAs (including EPTA) and its possible interpretation.
