The impact of outliers on pulsar timing arrays

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fumagalli, Giulia, Shaifullah, Golam, Sesana, Alberto
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Fumagalli, Giulia
Shaifullah, Golam
Sesana, Alberto
author_facet Fumagalli, Giulia
Shaifullah, Golam
Sesana, Alberto
contents The detection of gravitational waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) requires precise measurement of the difference between the pulsars' timing models and their observed pulses, as well as dealing with numerous and sometimes hard to diagnose sources of noise. Outliers may have an impact on this already difficult procedure, especially if the methods used are not robust to such anomalous observations. Until now, no complete and practical quantification of their effects on PTA data has been provided. With this work, we aim to fill this gap. We corrupt simulated datasets featuring an increasing degree of complexity with varying percentages of uniformly distributed outliers and investigate the impact of the latter on the recovery of the injected gravitational wave signals and pulsar noise terms. We found that the gravitational waves signal, due to its expected correlation, is more robust against these anomalous observations when compared to the other injected processes. This result is especially relevant in the context of the emerging statistical evidence for the gravitational wave background in PTA datasets, further strengthening those claims.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_01505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The impact of outliers on pulsar timing arrays
Fumagalli, Giulia
Shaifullah, Golam
Sesana, Alberto
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
The detection of gravitational waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) requires precise measurement of the difference between the pulsars' timing models and their observed pulses, as well as dealing with numerous and sometimes hard to diagnose sources of noise. Outliers may have an impact on this already difficult procedure, especially if the methods used are not robust to such anomalous observations. Until now, no complete and practical quantification of their effects on PTA data has been provided. With this work, we aim to fill this gap. We corrupt simulated datasets featuring an increasing degree of complexity with varying percentages of uniformly distributed outliers and investigate the impact of the latter on the recovery of the injected gravitational wave signals and pulsar noise terms. We found that the gravitational waves signal, due to its expected correlation, is more robust against these anomalous observations when compared to the other injected processes. This result is especially relevant in the context of the emerging statistical evidence for the gravitational wave background in PTA datasets, further strengthening those claims.
title The impact of outliers on pulsar timing arrays
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01505