Chromatic Noise Modeling of Pulsars in NANOGrav's 15-year Dataset

Poster Image
Event poster; details follow in description
Poster Session
A
Poster Number
03
Project Author(s)
Jeremy Baier
Institution
Oregon State University
Project Description

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) seek to detect the ripples in spacetime, known as gravitational waves, by monitoring a group of ultra-stable, pulsating neutron stars in our galaxy. In June 2023, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves (NANOGrav) reported strong evidence for the presence of a stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) in our 15-year data set. While this is an important measurement, the recovered spectrum of the GWB remains very noise model dependent. This work revisits the NANOGrav results using customized chromatic noise models for all 67 pulsars in the data set. We are customizing each noise model on a per-star basis and accounting for radio frequency-dependent time delays in our signals, including dispersion measure effects and scattering, while also including a global solar wind model. This study will ultimately investigate what effects these new noise models have on the GWB significance and parameter estimation.