Introductory Readings about NANOGrav

A first place to start is the introductory chapter to my thesis: link. It's actually not meant to introduce my very specific part of the research but was written to be a broad, fairly low-level introduction (fairly) to gravitational waves and pulsar timing array science.

Every ten years, the US astronomy community comes together to decide what its priorities should be for the next decade. People come together to write "white papers" for the Decadal Survey. White papers are reports often meant to advocate for a position, compared with academic papers which present new research. NANOGrav put out quite a few for the 2020 Decadal Survey but two are listed here below. The first is about the science more broadly and the second specifically talks about NANOGrav as a project and how we are going to address those scientific questions. There are reasons why it's broken up as such and it has to do with the way that the US National Academy of Sciences requests input to the survey.

To aid in your reading, here is a copy of the NANOGrav glossary: link. We try to make it as comprehensive as possible, and it's always a work in progress, so if you find that more could be added to it, please let me know!