2024/05/08 by Abraham Loeb, Loeb, Abraham · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Scientific Research and Discoveries #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.SR #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.05410
openalex publication_date 2024/05/08 · arxiv published 2024/05/08 · arxiv updated 2024/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently, Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) reported a signal at nanohertz frequencies consistent with a stochastic gravitational wave background. Here, I show that the Brownian motion of the Sun as a result of its random gravitational interactions with the cluster of thousands of unmodeled Main-belt asteroids of diameters <80km, combined with small inaccuracies in the estimated masses of larger asteroids, introduces timing noise for pulsars which is up to 20% of the reported signal at frequencies of ~1/(few-years). The asteroid contribution needs to be modeled better in order to obtain accurate inferences from the PTA signal.