A Quasar-based Supermassive Black Hole Binary Population Model: Implications for the Gravitational Wave Background

The nanohertz gravitational wave background (GWB) is believed to be dominated by GW emission from supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs). Observations of several dual-active galactic nuclei (AGN) strongly suggest a link between AGN and SMBHBs, given that these dual-AGN systems will eventually form bound binary pairs. Here we develop an exploratory SMBHB population model based on empirically constrained quasar populations, allowing us to decompose the GWB amplitude into an underlying distribution of SMBH masses, SMBHB number density, and volume enclosing the GWB. Our approach also allows us to self-consistently predict the number of local SMBHB systems from the GWB amplitude. Interestingly, we find the local number density of SMBHBs implied by the common-process signal in the NANOGrav 12.5-yr data set to be roughly five times larger than previously predicted by other models. We also find that at most ∼25% of SMBHBs can be associated with quasars. Furthermore, our quasar-based approach predicts ≳95% of the GWB signal comes from z ≲ 2.5, and that SMBHBs contributing to the GWB have masses ≳108 M ⊙. We also explore how different empirical galaxy–black hole scaling relations affect the local number density of GW sources, and find that relations predicting more massive black holes decrease the local number density of SMBHBs. Overall, our results point to the important role that a measurement of the GWB will play in directly constraining the cosmic population of SMBHBs, as well as their connections to quasars and galaxy mergers.

Principles of Gravitational-Wave Detection with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Pulsar timing uses the highly stable pulsar spin period to investigate many astrophysical topics. In particular, pulsar timing arrays make use of a set of extremely well-timed pulsars and their time correlations as a challenging detector of gravitational waves. It turns out that pulsar timing arrays are particularly sensitive to ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves, which makes them complementary to other gravitational-wave detectors. Here, we summarize the basics, focusing especially on supermassive black-hole binaries and cosmic strings, which have the potential to form a stochastic gravitational-wave background in the pulsar timing array detection band, and the scientific goals on this challenging topic. We also briefly outline the recent interesting results of the main pulsar timing array collaborations, which have found strong evidence of a common-spectrum process compatible with a stochastic gravitational-wave background and mention some new perspectives that are particularly interesting in view of the forthcoming radio observatories such as the Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, the MeerKAT telescope, and the Square Kilometer Array.

Mode changing in J1909−3744: the most precisely timed pulsar

We present baseband radio observations of the millisecond pulsar J1909−3744, the most precisely timed pulsar, using the MeerKAT telescope as part of the MeerTime pulsar timing array campaign. During a particularly bright scintillation event the pulsar showed strong evidence of pulse mode changing, among the first millisecond pulsars and the shortest duty cycle millisecond pulsar to do so. Two modes appear to be present, with the weak (lower signal-to-noise ratio) mode arriving 9.26 ±3.94 μs earlier than the strong counterpart. Further, we present a new value of the jitter noise for this pulsar of 8.20 ± 0.14 ns in one hour, finding it to be consistent with previous measurements taken with the MeerKAT (9 ± 3 ns) and Parkes (8.6 ± 0.8 ns) telescopes, but inconsistent with the previously most precise measurement taken with the Green Bank telescope (14 ± 0.5 ns). Timing analysis on the individual modes is carried out for this pulsar, and we find an approximate $10\%$ improvement in the timing precision is achievable through timing the strong mode only as opposed to the full sample of pulses. By forming a model of the average pulse from templates of the two modes, we time them simultaneously and demonstrate that this timing improvement can also be achieved in regular timing observations. We discuss the impact an improvement of this degree on this pulsar would have on searches for the stochastic gravitational wave background, as well as the impact of a similar improvement on all MeerTime PTA pulsars.

The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Search for Non-Einsteinian Polarization Modes in the Gravitational-wave Background

We search NANOGrav’s 12.5 yr data set for evidence of a gravitational-wave background (GWB) with all the spatial correlations allowed by general metric theories of gravity. We find no substantial evidence in favor of the existence of such correlations in our data. We find that scalar-transverse (ST) correlations yield signal-to-noise ratios and Bayes factors that are higher than quadrupolar (tensor-transverse, TT) correlations. Specifically, we find ST correlations with a signal-to-noise ratio of 2.8 that are preferred over TT correlations (Hellings and Downs correlations) with Bayesian odds of about 20:1. However, the significance of ST correlations is reduced dramatically when we include modeling of the solar system ephemeris systematics and/or remove pulsar J0030+0451 entirely from consideration. Even taking the nominal signal-to-noise ratios at face value, analyses of simulated data sets show that such values are not extremely unlikely to be observed in cases where only the usual TT modes are present in the GWB. In the absence of a detection of any polarization mode of gravity, we place upper limits on their amplitudes for a spectral index of γ = 5 and a reference frequency of f yr = 1 yr−1. Among the upper limits for eight general families of metric theories of gravity, we find the values of A TT 95 % = ( 9.7 ± 0.4 ) × 10 − 16 and A ST 95 % = ( 1.4 ± 0.03 ) × 10 − 15 for the family of metric spacetime theories that contain both TT and ST modes.