| Description: | The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA, for more info see http://epta.jb.man.ac.uk ) is a multinational collaboration between the five European pulsar groups associated with the Westerbork, Jodrell Bank (Lovell), Effelsberg, Nancay, and Sardinia (under construction) radio telescopes. Precision pulsar timing requires many measurements of pulse arrival times at multiple frequencies and combining the data sets from multiple telescopes provides much more data to work with. In addition to data, the EPTA also shares expertise and holds, for example, workshops to train students in the powerful technique of pulsar timing.
At the end of March, the EPTA, pictured here in the original Westerbork control room, met at ASTRON, primarily to discuss an exciting new project we are about to embark on: the Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP). The LEAP project will coherently combine the signals from the five EPTA telescopes to create a combined collecting area comparable to that of Arecibo. LEAP will effectively be the largest steerable radio telescope on Earth and will be able to see many important millisecond pulsars not visible from Arecibo. This will give a big boost (or "LEAP") to the timing precision we can achieve and allow us to push forward towards our ultimate goal of using an array of millisecond pulsars to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves. |
