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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025

Title: Source anisotropies and pulsar timing arrays
Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) hunt for gravitational waves (GWs) by searching for the correlations that GWs induce in the time-of-arrival residuals from different pulsars. If the GW sources are of astrophysical origin, then they are located at discrete points on the sky. However, PTA data are often modeled, and subsequently analyzed, via a “standard Gaussian ensemble.” That ensemble is obtained in the limit of an infinite density of vanishingly weak, Poisson-distributed sources. In this paper, we move away from that ensemble, to study the effects of two types of “source anisotropy.” The first (a), which is often called “shot noise,” arises because there are N discrete GW sources at specific sky locations. The second (b) arises because the GW source positions are not a Poisson process, for example, because galaxy locations are clustered. Here, we quantify the impact of (a) and (b) on the mean and variance of the pulsar-averaged Hellings and Downs correlation. For conventional PTA sources, we show that the effects of shot noise (a) are much larger than the effects of clustering (b). Published by the American Physical Society2024  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2020265
PAR ID:
10579494
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Physical Review D
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Physical Review D
Volume:
110
Issue:
12
ISSN:
2470-0010
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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