The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array

Science

The MPTA is sensitive to gravitational waves with wavelengths more than a billion times longer than those of terrestrial gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO or VIRGO. It searches for the background ensemble of all these nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves, maps the variations in the brightness of the background across the sky, and searches for individual sources of gravitational waves. While the primary goal of the MPTA is to study gravitational waves, the MPTA makes foundational contribution to other aspects of fundamental physics and astronomy.