Insights on the astrophysics of supermassive black hole binaries from pulsar timing observations

Abstract

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are designed to detect the predicted gravitational wave (GW) background produced by a cosmological population of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries. In this contribution I review the physics of such GW background, highlighting its dependence on the overall binary population, the relation between SMBHs and their hosts, and their coupling with the stellar and gaseous environment. The latter is particularly relevant when it drives the binaries to extreme eccentricities (e>0.9), which might be the case for stellar-driven systems. This causes a substantial suppression of the low frequency signal, potentially posing a serious threat to the effectiveness of PTA observations. A future PTA detection will allow to directly observe for the first time subparsec SMBH binaries on their way to the GW driven coalescence, providing important answers of the outstanding questions related to the physics underlying the formation and evolution of these spectacular sources.

14 pages, 2 figures. Invited contribution to the Focus Issue "Pulsar Timing Array", to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity

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Cited by in corpus (77)

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• Gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes missing in pulsar observations
• The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints On The Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Constraints on Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from the Gravitational Wave Background
• The International Pulsar Timing Array second data release: Search for an isotropic Gravitational Wave Background
• The NANOGrav Nine-year Data Set: Limits on the Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
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• Primordial gravitational waves from NANOGrav: a broken power-law approach
• The NANOGrav 11-Year Data Set: Limits on Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
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• First-order Phase Transition interpretation of PTA signal produces solar-mass Black Holes
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• Testing the binary hypothesis: pulsar timing constraints on supermassive black hole binary candidates
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• Variance of the Hellings-Downs Correlation
• Understanding black hole mass assembly via accretion and mergers at late times in cosmological simulations
• Gravitational Waves from SMBH Binaries in Light of the NANOGrav 15-Year Data
• Implications for the Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from the NANOGrav 15-year Data Set
• The noise properties of 42 millisecond pulsars from the European Pulsar Timing Array and their impact on gravitational wave searches
• Constraints On The Dynamical Environments Of Supermassive Black-hole Binaries Using Pulsar-timing Arrays
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• Detecting eccentric supermassive black hole binaries with pulsar timing arrays: Resolvable source strategies
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• Long-term Evolution of Binary Orbits Induced by Circumbinary Disks
• The NANOGrav Program for Gravitational Waves and Fundamental Physics
• Insights into searches for anisotropies in the nanohertz gravitational-wave background
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• Constraints on Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves
• Pulsar Timing Errors from Asynchronous Multi-Frequency Sampling of Dispersion Measure Variations
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• Evolution Of Binary Supermassive Black Holes In Rotating Nuclei
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• Revisiting evolution of domain walls and their gravitational radiation with CosmoLattice
• Cosmic variance in the nanohertz gravitational wave background
• Evolution Of Massive Black Hole Binaries In Rotating Stellar Nuclei: Implications For Gravitational Wave Detection
• Detectability of Gravitational Waves from High-Redshift Binaries
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