Current gravitational wave observatories have two significant limitations. The first is that they can only observe powerful gravitational bursts such as the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. The second is that they can only observe these mergers for wavelengths on the order of hundreds to thousands of kilometers. This means we can only observe stellar mass mergers. Of course, there's a lot of interesting gravitational astronomy going on at other wavelengths and noise levels, which has motivated astronomers to get clever. One of these clever ideas is to use pulsars as a telescope. Research has been published on the pre-print server arXiv.
, rotate so quickly that they emit hundreds of radio pulses a second. Since the rotation of a neutron star is almost as regular as clockwork, pulsars can be used as a kind of cosmic timepiece.
astronomers from the NANOGrav used an array of 67 pulsars with 15 years of data and were able to measure the background gravitational rumble of the universe. The likely sources of this background are supermassive binary black holes , but the results weren't entirely conclusive. One problem with the data is that while the team could measure the gravitational waves, they couldn't pinpoint the point of origin for them.
At the moment, while we know the distance to some pulsars very accurately, the distance of many pulsars is fuzzy. Detailed observations of PTA pulsars through observatories such as the Very Long Baseline Array could give us the precision we need. Knowing both the distance and the timing variation of awould give us a range for the source. With an array of pulsars, ranges would overlap to triangulate the source.
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