Gravitational waves from pulsars

This limits the power radiated via gravitational waves to be less than ~2% of the available spin-down power. For the X-ray pulsar J0537-6910 we reach the spin-down limit under the assumption that any gravitational wave signal from it stays phase locked to the X-ray pulses over timing glitches, and for pulsars J1913+1011 and J1952+3252 we are only a factor of a few above the spin-down limit. Of the recycled millisecond pulsars, several of the measured upper limits are only about an order of magnitude above their spin-down limits.

For these our best (lowest) upper limit on gravitational wave amplitude is 2.3x10^-26^ for J1603-7202 and our best (lowest) limit on the inferred pulsar ellipticity is 7.0x10^-8^ for J2124-3358.