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Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) is a pulsar timing array (PTA), a selected group of pulsars along with an effort to record the timing of the pulsars' cycles using the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, and to compare and analyze their timing histories to detect gravitational waves. It is part of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) collaboration. The array consists of more than twenty millisecond pulsars (MSPs).
PTAs as gravitational-wave detectors are sensitive to a different range of frequencies than LIGO's and Virgo's 10-10000 Hz regime: the range for PTAs is microhertz and slower (e.g., nanohertz gravitational waves), the presumed detectable sources being binary SMBHs with orbits in this frequency range.
The term PPTA4 refers to a subset of four millisecond pulsars specifically chosen for study because a very high-precision timing history has been obtained for them.