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One of the primary gravitational wave (GW) sources for pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) is the stochastic background formed by supermassive black holes binaries (SMBHBs). In this paper, we investigate how the environments of SMBHBs will effect…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2016-12-14 Sarah J. Vigeland , Xavier Siemens

By monitoring the times of arrival of radio pulses from millisecond pulsars, Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) serve as unique gravitational wave (GW) laboratories in the nanohertz band. To date, the primary astrophysical sources of GWs targeted…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-24 Hippolyte Quelquejay Leclere

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are designed to detect gravitational waves (GWs) at nHz frequencies. The expected dominant signal is given by the superposition of all waves emitted by the cosmological population of supermassive black hole…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-22 Alberto Sesana

We combine new analysis of the stochastic gravitational wave background to be expected from cosmic strings with the latest pulsar timing array (PTA) limits to give an upper bound on the energy scale of the possible cosmic string network,…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-04-21 Jose J. Blanco-Pillado , Ken D. Olum , Xavier Siemens

One of the most promising targets for Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) is identifying an individual supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) out of the population of binaries theorized to produce a gravitational wave background (GWB). In this…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-04-21 Levi Schult , Polina Petrov , Stephen R. Taylor , Nihan Pol , Nima Laal , Maria Charisi , Chung-Pei Ma

We consider the information that can be derived about massive black-hole binary populations and their formation history solely from current and possible future pulsar timing array (PTA) results. We use models of the stochastic…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-11-11 Hannah Middleton , Walter Del Pozzo , Will M. Farr , Alberto Sesana , Alberto Vecchio

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are anticipated to detect the stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) from supermassive binary black holes (BBHs) as well as the gravitational waves from individual BBHs. Recently, a common process signal…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-06-21 Yunfeng Chen , Qingjuan Yu , Youjun Lu

Massive black holes (MBHs) exist in the Galactic center (GC) and other nearby galactic nuclei. As natural outcome of galaxy mergers, some MBHs may have a black hole (BH) companion. In this paper, assuming that the MBHs in the GC and some…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-11-22 Xiao Guo , Qingjuan Yu , Youjun Lu

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) measure nHz frequency gravitational waves (GWs) generated by orbiting massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) with periods between 0.1-10 yr. Previous studies on the nHz GW background assumed that the inspiral is…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-18 Bence Kocsis , Alberto Sesana

Supermassive black hole binaries are the strongest gravitational wave sources in the universe. The systems most likely to be observed with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) will have particularly high masses ($\gtrsim 10^9 M_\odot$), long periods…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2014-11-17 Jeremy D. Schnittman

NANOGrav and other Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) have discovered a common-spectrum process in the nHz range that may be due to gravitational waves (GWs): if so, they are likely to have been generated by black hole (BH) binaries with total…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-08-02 John Ellis , Malcolm Fairbairn , Gert Hütsi , Martti Raidal , Juan Urrutia , Ville Vaskonen , Hardi Veermäe

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will open complementary observational windows on massive black-hole binaries (MBHBs), i.e., with masses in the range $\sim 10^6 - 10^{10}\,$ M$_{\odot}$. While…

The observation of massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) is one of the goals of gravitational wave astronomy in the coming years. Massive (>10^8 solar masses) and low-redshift (< 1.5) sources are expected to…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2010-05-19 Alberto Sesana , Alberto Vecchio

The detection of compact binary mergers with sub-solar masses at gravitational-wave observatories could mark the groundbreaking discovery of primordial black holes (PBHs). Concurrently, evidence for a nHz stochastic gravitational wave…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-08-28 Yann Gouttenoire , Sokratis Trifinopoulos , Miguel Vanvlasselaer

Galaxy observations suggest that mergers of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are rare events, with rates of order one per decade across the observable Universe. We present a framework to search for merging SMBHBs in pulsar timing…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-17 Sharon Mary Tomson , Boris Goncharov , Rutger van Haasteren

Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments worldwide recently reported evidence of a nHz stochastic gravitational wave background (sGWB) compatible with the existence of slowly inspiralling massive black hole (MBH) binaries (MBHBs). The shape of…

Gravitational Waves (GW) have now been detected from stellar-mass black hole binaries, and the first observations of GW from Massive Black Hole (MBH) Binaries are expected within the next decade. Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTA), which can…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-10-06 Luke Zoltan Kelley , Laura Blecha , Lars Hernquist

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) might detect gravitational waves (GWs) from massive black hole (MBH) binaries within this decade. The signal is expected to be an incoherent superposition of several nearly-monochromatic waves of different…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-11 Antoine Petiteau , Stanislav Babak , Alberto Sesana , Mariana de Araujo

Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) have recently found strong evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) in the nanohertz frequency regime. As GWs pass, they produce deviations in measured lengths and light-travel times. PTA experiments…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-05-05 Luke Zoltan Kelley

This paper presents a technique to search for supermassive black hole binaries (MBHBs) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The search is based on the peculiar properties of merging galaxies that are found in a mock galaxy catalog from…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2014-03-06 Pablo A. Rosado , Alberto Sesana