European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

By Stanislav Babak, A. Petiteau, A. Sesana, P. Brem, P. Rosado, S. Taylor, A. Lassus, Jason W. T. Hessels, Cees G. Bassa, M. Burgay and 26 more. 2015

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have searched for continuous gravitational wave (CGW) signals produced by individually resolvable, circular supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) in the latest European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) data set, which consists of ultraprecise timing data on 41-ms pulsars. We develop frequentist and Bayesian detection algorithms to search both for monochromatic and frequency-evolving systems. None of the adopted algorithms show evidence for the presence of such a CGW signal, indicating that the data are best described by pulsar and radiometer noise only. Depending on the adopted detection algorithm, the 95 per cent upper limit on the sky-averaged strain amplitude lies in the range 6 × 10−15 10^9M⊙ out to a distance of about 25 Mpc, and with Mc > 10^10M⊙ out to a distance of about 1Gpc (z ≈ 0.2). We show that state-of-the-art SMBHB population models predict <1 per cent probability of detecting a CGW with the current EPTA data set, consistent with the reported non-detection. We stress, however, that PTA limits on individual CGW have improved by almost an order of magnitude in the last five years. The continuing advances in pulsar timing data acquisition and analysis techniques will allow for strong astrophysical constraints on the population of nearby SMBHBs in the corning years.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42d860cffbc776d001ba35b8cd980c5a3cdb7b2b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, background): “Other possible sources of gravitational waves in this band are individual massive binary systems (Arzoumanian et al. 2014; Babak et al. 2016), gravitational bursts with memory (e.g., Seto 2009; Madison et al. 2014; Zhu et al. 2014; Arzoumanian et al. 2015a), primordial gravitational waves from…”
The local nanohertz gravitational-wave landscape from supermassive black hole binaries (2017, methodology): “…binary’s 2 Formally we set tc = 0 and sample in −t 3 strain contribution to the closest pixel in a HEALPix sky map, and computing the characteristic strain h2c = ∑ k h 2 kfk/∆f , where hk is the strain of source k, f is its GW frequency, and ∆f is the inverse observation time (Babak et al. 2016).”