The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves

The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is a consortium of astronomers whose goal is the creation of a galactic scale gravitational wave observatory sensitive to gravitational waves in the nHz-microHz band. It is just one component of an international collaboration involving similar organizations of European and Australian astronomers who share the same goal. Gravitational waves, a prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, are a phenomenon of dynamical space-time generated by the bulk motion of matter, and the dynamics of space-time itself. They are detectable by the small disturbance they cause in the light travel time between some light source and an observer. NANOGrav exploits radio pulsars as both the light (radio) source and the clock against which the light travel time is measured. In an array of radio pulsars gravitational waves manifest themselves as correlated disturbances in the pulse arrival times. The timing precision of today's best measured pulsars is less than 100 ns. With improved instrumentation and signal-to-noise it is widely believed that the next decade could see a pulsar timing network of 100 pulsars each with better than 100 ns timing precision. Such a pulsar timing array (PTA), observed with a regular cadence of days to weeks, would be capable of observing supermassive black hole binaries following galactic mergers, relic radiation from early universe phenomena such as cosmic strings, cosmic superstrings, or inflation, and more generally providing a vantage on the universe whose revolutionary potential has not been seen in the 400 years since Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens.