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Supermassive black hole binary systems (SMBHBs) should be the most powerful sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the Universe. Once Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) detect the stochastic GW background from their cosmic merger history,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-06-26 Nicole M. Khusid , Chiara M. F. Mingarelli , Priyamvada Natarajan , J. Andrew Casey-Clyde , Anna Barnacka

While massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) merge at gravitational-wave frequencies above the pulsar timing array (PTA) sensitivity band, we show that they leave orphaned low-frequency contributions in the PTA pulsar term. Due to the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-24 Alexander W. Criswell , Stephen R. Taylor , Kris Pardo , Alberto Sesana , David Izquierdo , Silvia Bonoli , Daniele Spinoso

Large-area sky surveys show that massive galaxies undergo at least one major merger in a Hubble time. Ongoing pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments are aimed at measuring the gravitational wave (GW) emission from binary supermassive black…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-22 V. Ravi , J. S. B. Wyithe , R. M. Shannon , G. Hobbs

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

We estimate the merger timescale of spectroscopically-selected, subparsec supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) candidates by comparing their expected contribution to the gravitational wave background (GWB) with the sensitivity of current…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-10-13 Khai Nguyen , Tamara Bogdanovic , Jessie C. Runnoe , Stephen R. Taylor , Alberto Sesana , Michael Eracleous , Steinn Sigurdsson

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of every massive galaxy in the local Universe with masses that closely correlate with observations of their host galaxy implying a connected evolutionary history. The population of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-06-06 Joseph Simon

Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) formed in galaxy mergers are promising multi-messenger sources. They can be identified as quasars with periodic variability in electromagnetic (EM) time-domain surveys. The most massive of those…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-13 Maria Charisi , Stephen Taylor , Jessie Runnoe , Caitlin Witt , Polina Petrov

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are placing increasingly stringent constraints on the strain amplitude of continuous gravitational waves emitted by supermassive black hole binaries on subparsec scales. In this paper, we incorporate independent…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-04-08 Katelin Schutz , Chung-Pei Ma

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

In this letter we carry out the first systematic investigation of the expected gravitational wave (GW) background generated by supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries in the nHz frequency band accessible to pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). We…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-12 A. Sesana

Pulsar timing observations are used to place constraints on the rate of coalescence of supermassive black-hole (SMBH) binaries as a function of mass and redshift. In contrast to the indirect constraints obtained from other techniques,…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-27 Z. L. Wen , F. A. Jenet , D. Yardley , G. B. Hobbs , R. N. Manchester

Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are expected to emit continuous gravitational waves in the pulsar timing array (PTA) frequency band ($10^{-9}$--$10^{-7}$ Hz). The development of data analysis techniques aimed at efficient…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-04 Justin Ellis , Xavier Siemens , Jolien Creighton

Pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to gravitational waves from supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries at orbital separations of << 1pc. There is currently an observational paucity of such systems, although they are central figures in…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-16 Sarah Burke-Spolaor

Supermassive black holes are commonly found in the center of galaxies and evolve with their hosts. The supermassive binary black holes (SMBBH) are thus expected to exist in close galaxy pairs, however, none has been unequivocally detected.…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2020-07-15 Yi Feng , Di Li , Zheng Zheng , Chao-Wei Tsai

Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments have entered a new era with evidence for a nanoHertz gravitational wave background (GWB). This review describes the physics of detection, detailing the noise models and cross-correlation techniques…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-01 C. M. F. Mingarelli , J. A. Casey-Clyde , Y. T. Chang , E. Eisenberg , F. Hutchison , N. Khusid , B. Larsen , A. Moran , F. Semenzato , L. Willson , Q. Zheng

Ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) generated by individual inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) at the centers of galaxies may be detected by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) in the future. These GW signals, which…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-05-30 Ling-Feng Wang , Yue Shao , Si-Ren Xiao , Jing-Fei Zhang , Xin Zhang

Gravitational waves coming from Super Massive Black Hole Binaries (SMBHBs) are targeted by both Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) and Space Laser Interferometry (SLI). The possibility of a single SMBHB being tracked first by PTA, through inspiral,…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2013-02-12 Alessandro D. A. M. Spallicci

Gravitational wave (GW) searches using pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are commonly assumed to be limited to a GW frequency of $\lesssim 4\times 10^{-7}$Hz given by the Nyquist rate associated with the average observational cadence of $2$ weeks…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-04-01 Xuan Tao , Yan Wang , Soumya D. Mohanty

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 A. Sesana , A. Vecchio , M. Volonteri

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