The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array 4.5 year data release and related materials

This data accompanies the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society publication of the papers: “The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: The 4.5-year data release and the noise and stochastic signals of the millisecond pulsar population”, “The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: The first search for gravitational waves with the MeerKAT radio telescope”, and “The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: Maps of the gravitational-wave sky with the 4.5 year data release”.

Included in this data release is 4.5 years of data collected as part of the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array, using the MeerKAT radio telescope located in the Great Karoo region of South Africa.

Specifically, this contains:
* The pulsar archives produced by the data processing pipeline that have been used for this data release in PSRFITS file format.
* Sub-banded arrival times, measured at 32 frequencies across the MeerKAT L-band receiver.
* The ephemerides of the pulsars in a TEMPO2 readable format.
* Templates used for measuring the corresponding arrival times. These are frequency resolved portraits across 32 channels that were constructed for more accurate timing.

In addition, short videos accompanying “The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: Maps of the gravitational-wave sky with the 4.5 year data release” are also included.

These videos represent:

Visualisations of the clean map 𝑆/𝑁 across the sky of the simulated white noise + gravitational-wave background dataset moving through different regularisation cut-offs. The video in the first frequency bin (7nHz) corresponds to Fig. C1 in Grunthal & Nathan et al., 2024. We also provide the 2nd (14nHz) and 3rd (21nHz) frequency bins.
GWB_snr_fbin1.mp4
GWB_snr_fbin2.mp4
GWB_snr_fbin3.mp4

Visualisations of the clean map 𝑆/𝑁 across the sky of a simulated point source (continuous wave) signal dataset moving through regularisation cut-offs. The video in the first frequency bin (7nHz) corresponds to Fig. C2 in Grunthal & Nathan et al., 2024. We also provide the 2nd (14nHz) and 3rd (21nHz) frequency bins.
CGW_snr_fbin1.mp4
CGW_snr_fbin2.mp4
CGW_snr_fbin3.mp4

Visualisations of the clean map 𝑆/𝑁 measured by the MPTA across the sky moving through regularisation cut-offs. The video in the first frequency bin (7nHz) corresponds to Fig. C4 in Grunthal & Nathan et al., 2024. We also provide the 2nd (14nHz) and 3rd (21nHz) frequency bins.
full_snr_fbin1.mp4
full_snr_fbin2.mp4
full_snr_fbin3.mp4