@astromattmiles.bsky.social (Swinburne, now Vanderbilt) for his thesis “Millisecond pulsar timing and gravitational wave searches with the MeerKAT radio telescope” supervised by @ryanmshannon.bsky.social has been awarded the Charlene Heisler Prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis in astronomy.

Similar results from the EPTA as well today:
arxiv.org/abs/2412.02232

You can read @astromattmiles.bsky.social and @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social's conversation piece here:
theconversation.com/to-map-the-v...

It's been an epic adventure so far for the MPTA. There are more questions to answer!

The good news is that with additional observations we should be able to develop better models for the data, which combined with longer timing baselines such make for an even more sensitive data set.

The evidence for the correlations depends a lot on the model assumptions. We think this is due to the short nature of the MPTA data set.

The data set produced and searched by @astromattmiles.bsky.social show evidence for gravitational waves like other PTA experiments. This includes evidence for Helling-Downs-like correlations

From the 2.5 to 4.5 year data sets, the noise has become more pronounced and prevelent in the pulsar timing data sets.

As data started to accumulate, we started seeing noise in the pulsar timing residuals of the best pulsars. The noise could be consistent with a gravitational wave background.

We then embarked on regular observations of the largest sample of millisecond pulsars possible. This would ensure our sensitivity increased quickly with time. This would become the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array (MPTA).

MeerTime MSP timing started in 2019 with a census of the southern millisecond pulsars, led by Swinburne PhD student Renee Spiewak.