The European Pulsar Timing Array is a multinational European collaboration of pulsar astronomers. Our aim is to increase the precision and quality of pulsar science results by combining the efforts and resources of the various member institutions and telescopes.
Our focus concerns the direct detection of gravitational waves using pulsar timing. To do this, we are performing long-term timing observations and analysis on an array of pulsar systems scattered across the sky. The coalescence of primordial black holes – during galaxy mergers, for example – should form a stochastic background of gravitational waves permeating the Universe. The background at the Earth would have a common effect on the arrival times of pulses from pulsars distributed around the sky, detectable as a correlated signal in the timing residuals obtained from all the pulsars in the array.
The success of such an effort requires the achievement of two principal goals:
> Timing pulsars with the highest possible precision.
> Finding new pulsars for high-precision timing.
In pursuit of these goals, work has been conducted for the LEAP project. This combines the signals from all the telescopes involved in our collaboration to provide a telescope area equivalent to that of the illuminated Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. LEAP, however, can see more of the sky and to track objects for longer periods of time.