Abstract:
For over a decade the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has been using the Green Bank and Arecibo radio telescopes to monitor millisecond pulsars.The goal of the NANOGrav is to directly detect low-frequency (nano-Hertz) gravitational waves which cause small correlated changes to the times of arrival of radio pulses from millisecond pulsars. The most promising sources of gravitational waves at these frequencies are supermassive binary black holes that coalesce following the mergers of galaxies. In this talk I will give a status update and discuss the work of NANOGrav, as well as our sensitivity to gravitational waves from astrophysical sources.

Host: Matt Evans