Gravitational waves from resolvable massive black hole binary systems and observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays

By A. Sesana, Alberto Vecchio, M. Volonteri. 2008

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive black holes are key components of the assembly and evolution of cosmic structures, and a number of surveys are currently on going or planned to probe the demographics of these objects and to gain insight into the relevant physical processes. Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) currently provide the only means to observe gravitational radiation from massive black hole binary systems with masses 10 7 M� . The whole cosmic population produces a stochastic background that could be detectable with upcoming PTAs. Sources sufficiently close and/or massive generate gravitational radiation that significantly exceeds the level of the background and could be individually resolved. We consider a wide range of massive black hole binary assembly scenarios, investigate the distribution of the main physical parameters of the sources, such as masses and redshift, and explore the consequences for PTAs observations. Depending on the specific massive black hole population model, we estimate that on average at least one resolvable source produces timing residuals in the range ∼5–50 ns. PTAs, and in particular the future Square Kilometre Array, can plausibly detect these unique systems, although the events are likely to be rare. These observations would naturally complement on the high-mass end of the massive black hole distribution function future surveys carried out by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ef1b8fdd2c01e23eb19bf9428bbf8412f4cdab6

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves (2014, background): “ are inspiralling faster and, hence, there are fewer of them per frequency bin. At a certain frequency, these sources cease to be a background and become individually resolvable (Sesana et al., 2008; Sesana et al., 2009). It is currently unclear whether PTAs shall detect an individual binary or a st”
Timing stability of millisecond pulsars and prospects for gravitational-wave detection (2009, background): “The models do, furthermore, rely on a substantial number of poorly determined input parameters, such as what fraction of galaxy growth happens by merging (Sesana et al. 2009).”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “This band is expected to dominated by gravitational waves from a very large population of unresolved MBH binaries (Sesana et al., 2008) with possibly a few discrete sources (Sesana et al., 2009a).”
THE NANOGRAV NINE-YEAR DATA SET: OBSERVATIONS, ARRIVAL TIME MEASUREMENTS, AND ANALYSIS OF 37 MILLISECOND PULSARS (2015, background): “…PTA measurements can be used to attempt to measure other gravitational wave signals, such as periodic gravitational waves from individual sources (Sesana et al. 2009; Arzoumanian et al. 2014) and permanent deformations in spacetime, referred to as gravitational-wave “memory” (e.g., Madison et…”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries (2015, background): “However, Sesana et al. (2009) (see also Ravi et al. 2012) first showed that the signal is dominated by a handful of sources, some of which might be individually resolvable.”
Gravitational wave astronomy of single sources with a pulsar timing array (2011, background): “…al. 2004; Sesana & Vecchio 2010; Burt et al. 2010; Finn & Lommen 2010; Yardley et al. 2010; Deng & Finn 2010; Corbin & Cornish 2010), because of possible nearby (z ≪ 1) coalescing binary systems that produce GW signals detectable with PTAs (Wen et al. 2009; Sesana et al. 2009; Burke-Spolaor 2010).”
Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments (2016, background): “For example, at higher frequencies (& 1 yr−1) from a finite numbers of sources (Sesana et al. 2009), or at lower frequencies due to eccentric binary evolution (e.g. Sesana 2010).”
Systematic investigation of the expected gravitational wave signal from supermassive black hole binaries in the pulsar timing band (2012, methodology): “Before proceeding, it is worth mentioning that the shortcomings of equation (1) in catching the relevant features of theGW signal emitted by a realistic population ofquasi monochromatic sourceswere extensively investigated by (Sesana et al. 2008, 2009; Ravi et al. 2012).”
Testing Relativistic Gravity with Radio Pulsars (2014, background): “The most promising source in the nano-Hz frequency band is a stochastic gravitational wave background, as a result of many mergers of super-massive black hole binaries in the past history of the Universe [166, 167].”
The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “…mass and distance of the continuous wave might be inferred simply based on the fact that statistically, we expect the first few continuous-wave detections to be of the heaviest, relatively equal-mass systems, at low to moderate redshifts (z 1), as demonstrated originally in Sesana et al. (2009).”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, background): “Improved data sets should enable the detection and study of individual GW sources, for example, bright black hole binaries (Sesana et al. 2009) or burst signals from cosmic strings (Damour & Vilenkin 2005; Sanidas et al. 2012).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, result): “ models are generally bound to the limiting resolution of the underlying N-body simulations, and are therefore complete only for galaxy masses larger than approximately 1010 M . In a companion study, Sesana et al. (2009) also showed that the merging black hole mass functions predicted by EPS based m”