English

Pre-localization of Massive Black Hole Binaries in the Millihertz Band

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-04-28 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

The space-borne gravitational-wave (GW) detectors will open a new mass and redshift regime, allowing us to observe massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) throughout the Universe. A subset of these systems is expected to produce electromagnetic (EM) counterparts, offering a unique opportunity to follow the continuous evolution of massive black holes through joint GW and EM observations. Realizing this potential, however, requires low-latency, high-throughput data-analysis pipelines that can extract reliable source parameters and sky localizations from space-borne data streams fast enough to trigger EM follow-up. In this work we develop a fast, normalising flow-based inference pipeline designed for early-warning analysis of MBHB signals in a TianQin-like configuration. Our method combines a learned embedding of the detector time series with a neural spline flow (NSF) to perform amortized Bayesian inference, producing posterior samples for the main source parameters in roughly one minute per event. For a representative MBHB whose merger occurs 15\sim 15 minutes after the end of the analyzed GW observation, the pipeline achieves pre-merger sky localizations of order 20 deg2\sim 20~\mathrm{deg}^2, recovers the same number of sky modes as a reference parallel-tempered Markov chain Monte Carlo (PTMCMC) analysis, and yields parameter uncertainties of comparable scale, while still operating within a practically useful pre-merger warning window. These results demonstrate that NSF-based inference can deliver accurate, near-real-time parameter estimation for space-borne MBHB GW signals, and that the resulting early-warning localizations are sufficiently precise to make rapid EM follow-up.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24330,
  title  = {Pre-localization of Massive Black Hole Binaries in the Millihertz Band},
  author = {Xue-Ting Zhang and Jonathan Gair and Chris Messenger and Natalia Korsakova and Yi-Ming Hu and Hong-Yu Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24330},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages,6 figures