Solar Proximity Cuts and the Gravitational Wave Background_

Introduction

This project explores approaches to deal with noisy data collected when pulsars pass near the Sun. Solar wind interference can obscure the faint signals we are looking for, so we investigated whether removing these specific observations helps or hinders our analysis.

By comparing real MeerKAT data against simulations, we tested how "cutting" solar-proximity data affects the strength of the Gravitational Wave Background signal. Our goal was to better understand the trade-off between keeping more data and reducing solar noise, providing insights into how we might optimize detection strategies in the future.