Timing of binary pulsars and the search for the low-frequency gravitational waves

Abstract

Millisecond and binary pulsars are the most stable natural standards of astronomical time giving us a unique opportunity to search for gravitational waves (GW) and to test General Relativity. GWs from violent events in early Universe and from the ensemble of galactic and extragalactic objects perturb propagation of radio pulses from a pulsar to observer bringing about stochastic fluctuations in the times of arrival of the pulses (TOA). If one observes the pulsar over a sufficiently long time span, the fluctuations will be registered as a low-frequency, correlated noise affecting the timing residuals in the frequency range 10⁻¹² ÷ 10⁻⁷ Hz. This work demonstrates how the standard procedure of processing of the pulsar timing data can bias the estimate of the upper limit on the density of the GW background (GWB).