AbstractSupermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) should be an inevitable consequence of the hierarchical growth of massive galaxies through mergers and the strongest sirens of gravitational waves (GWs) in the cosmos. Yet, their direct detection has remained elusive due to the compact (sub-parsec) orbital separations of gravitationally bound SMBHBs. Here we exploit a theoretically predicted signature of SMBHBs in the time domain. We have begun a systematic search for SMBHB candidates in the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey (MDS) and reported our first significant detection of such a candidate from our pilot study of MD09 in Liu et al. (2015). Our candidate PSO J334.2028+01.4075 has a detected period of 542 days, varying persistently over the available baseline. From its archival spectrum, we estimated the black hole mass of the z = 2.06 quasar to be ∼1010 M⊙. The inferred ∼7 Rs binary separation therefore puts this candidate in the regime of GW-dominated orbital decay, opening up the exciting possibility of finding GW sources detectable by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) in a wide-field optical synoptic survey.
CONSTRAINING THE COALESCENCE RATE OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK-HOLE BINARIES USING PULSAR TIMING
