Colloquium by Scott Ransom, NRAO
Millisecond Pulsars (MSPs) have become reliable and extremely stable workhorses of modern astronomy and physics. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, has been observing growing numbers of these systems for over 16 years, and the data look great. High precision timing of almost 80 MSPs has provided unprecedented sensitivity to the gravitational wave Universe at nHz-frequencies, where our upper limits are already constraining the population of super-massive black hole binaries. But our sensitivity is increasing each year as we continue to add MSPs to our timing array and develop new techniques to remove systematics. Meanwhile, though, our observations provide a wide variety of astrophysics, such as new neutron star mass measurements and constraints of the dense matter equation of state.
Followed by wine and cheese.
Host: David Helfand