Detecting the Orbital Motion of Nearby Supermassive Black Hole Binaries with Gaia

Abstract

We show that a 10 year Gaia mission could astrometrically detect the orbital motion of ~1 sub-parsec separation supermassive black hole binary in the heart of nearby, bright active galactic nuclei (AGN). Candidate AGN lie out to a redshift of z=0.02 and in the V-band magnitude range $10\lesssim m_V\lesssim 13$. The distribution of detectable binary masses peaks at a few times $10^7$ solar masses and is truncated above a few times $10^8$ solar masses.

Published in Phys. Rev. D

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• Searching for gravitational waves via Doppler tracking by future missions to Uranus and Neptune
• Determining sub-parsec supermassive black hole binary orbits with infrared interferometry
• Detection of eccentric close-binary supermassive black holes with incomplete interferometric data