Pulsar

Pulsars orbiting within the curved space-time around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, could serve as probes of gravity in the strong-field regime.[65] Arrival times of the pulses would be affected by special- and general-relativistic Doppler shifts and by the complicated paths that the radio waves would travel through the strongly curved space-time around the black hole. In order for the effects of general relativity to be measurable with current instruments, pulsars with orbital periods less than about 10 years would need to be discovered;[65] such pulsars would orbit at distances inside 0.01 pc from Sgr A*. Searches are currently underway; at present, five pulsars are known to lie within 100 pc from Sgr A*.[66] Gravitational wave detectors edit There are four consortia around the world which use pulsars to search for gravitational waves: the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) in Europe, the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) in Australia, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) in Canada and the US, and the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) in India. Together, the consortia form the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA). The pulses from Millisecond Pulsars (MSPs) are used as a system of galactic clocks. Disturbances in the clocks will be measurable at Earth. A disturbance from a passing gravitational wave will have a particular signature across the ensemble of pulsars, and will be thus detected.