The NANOGrav 11-Year Data Set: Limits on Gravitational Wave Memory

Abstract

The mergers of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) promise to be incredible sources of gravitational waves (GWs). While the oscillatory part of the merger gravitational waveform will be outside the frequency sensitivity range of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs), the non-oscillatory GW memory effect is detectable. Further, any burst of gravitational waves will produce GW memory, making memory a useful probe of unmodeled exotic sources and new physics. We searched the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) 11-year data set for GW memory. This dataset is sensitive to very low frequency GWs of $\sim 3$ to $400$ nHz (periods of $\sim 11$ yr $-$ $1$ mon). Finding no evidence for GWs, we placed limits on the strain amplitude of GW memory events during the observation period. We then used the strain upper limits to place limits on the rate of GW memory causing events. At a strain of $2.5\times 10^{-14}$, corresponding to the median upper limit as a function of source sky position, we set a limit on the rate of GW memory events at $<0.4$ yr${}^{-1}$. That strain corresponds to a SMBHB merger with reduced mass of $\eta M\sim 2\times 10^{10}{M}_{\odot }$ and inclination of $\iota =\pi /3$ at a distance of 1 Gpc. As a test of our analysis, we analyzed the NANOGrav 9-year data set as well. This analysis found an anomolous signal, which does not appear in the 11-year data set. This signal is not a GW, and its origin remains unknown.

arXiv comment10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (54)

• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run
• Revisiting the Scaling Relations of Black Hole Masses and Host Galaxy Properties
• TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. I: Overview
• Tempo2, a new pulsar timing package. II: The timing model and precision estimates
• Binary and Millisecond Pulsars
• The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars
• The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational Waves Probe the Coalescence Rate of Massive Black Hole Binaries
• The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints On The Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background
• Gravitational wave bursts from cusps and kinks on cosmic strings
• Limits on the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves
• Pulsar Recoil and Gravitational Radiation due to Asymmetrical Stellar Collapse and Explosion
• The NANOGrav Nine-year Data Set: Limits on the Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
• The International Pulsar Timing Array: Second data release
• Gravitational waves from resolvable massive black hole binary systems and observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Detecting gravitational-wave memory with LIGO: implications of GW150914
• The NANOGrav Nine-year Data Set: Observations, Arrival Time Measurements, and Analysis of 37 Millisecond Pulsars
• Linking the spin evolution of massive black holes to galaxy kinematics
• Post-Newtonian corrections to the gravitational-wave memory for quasicircular, inspiralling compact binaries
• Remnant Masses, Spins and Recoils from the Merger of Generic Black-Hole Binaries
• Low-frequency gravitational waves from supermassive black holes
• The 2.5PN gravitational wave polarisations from inspiralling compact binaries in circular orbits
• The NANOGrav 11-Year Data Set: Limits on Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Nonlinear gravitational-wave memory from binary black hole mergers
• Hyper-efficient model-independent Bayesian method for the analysis of pulsar timing data
• A study of spatial correlations in pulsar timing array data
• Gravitational-wave memory and pulsar timing arrays
• Precision southern hemisphere VLBI pulsar astrometry II: Measurement of seven parallaxes
• Searching for gravitational wave memory bursts with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• The NANOGrav Nine-Year Data Set: Excess Noise in Millisecond Pulsar Arrival Times
• A Micro-glitch in the Millisecond Pulsar B1821-24 in M28
• A glitch in the millisecond pulsar J0613-0200
• Search for Memory and Inspiral Gravitational Waves from Super-Massive Binary Black Holes with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The gravitational-wave memory from eccentric binaries
• Observing gravitational wave bursts in pulsar timing measurements
• The NANOGrav Nine-year Data Set: Astrometric Measurements of 37 Millisecond Pulsars
• Binary Pulsar Distances and Velocities from Gaia Data Release 2
• NANOGrav Constraints on Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory
• Gravitational-wave memory: waveforms and phenomenology
• The NANOGrav Nine-Year Data Set: Noise Budget for Pulsar Arrival Times on Intraday Timescales
• A Bayesian analysis pipeline for continuous GW sources in the PTA band
• Low-rank approximations for large stationary covariance matrices, as used in the Bayesian and generalized-least-squares analysis of pulsar-timing data
• Gravitational Waves from Orphan Memory
• Assessing Pulsar Timing Array Sensitivity to Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory
• Accelerated Bayesian model-selection and parameter-estimation in continuous gravitational-wave searches with pulsar-timing arrays
• Versatile Directional Searches for Gravitational Waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Observational constraints on light cosmic strings from photometry and pulsar timing
• Optimizing Pulsar Timing Arrays to Maximize Gravitational Wave Single Source Detection: a First Cut
• Pulsar Timing Perturbations from Galactic Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory
• The Gravitational-Wave Discovery Space of Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Optimization of NANOGrav's Time Allocation for Maximum Sensitivity to Single Sources
• Extending gravitational wave burst searches with pulsar timing arrays

Cited by in corpus (35)

• The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Search For An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
• The International Pulsar Timing Array second data release: Search for an isotropic Gravitational Wave Background
• The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: Observations and Narrowband Timing of 47 Millisecond Pulsars
• The Gravitational-Wave Physics II: Progress
• From Bright Binaries To Bumpy Backgrounds: Mapping Realistic Gravitational Wave Skies With Pulsar-Timing Arrays
• Forecasts for detecting the gravitational-wave memory effect with Advanced LIGO and Virgo
• Non-tensorial Gravitational Wave Background in NANOGrav 12.5-Year Data Set
• Outlook for detecting the gravitational wave displacement and spin memory effects with current and future gravitational wave detectors
• Brans-Dicke theory in Bondi-Sachs form: Asymptotically flat solutions, asymptotic symmetries and gravitational-wave memory effects
• Can gravitational-wave memory help constrain binary black-hole parameters? A LISA case study
• The NANOGrav 11-Year Data Set: Evolution of Gravitational Wave Background Statistics
• The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Bayesian Limits on Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Model Dependence of Bayesian Gravitational-Wave Background Statistics for Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The Gravitational Wave Universe Toolbox: A software package to simulate observation of the Gravitational Wave Universe with different detectors
• Multi-messenger Approaches to Supermassive Black Hole Binary Detection and Parameter Estimation: Implications for Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Searches with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The First-Order Velocity Memory Effect from Compact Binary Coalescing Sources
• Gravitational Waves from Black-Hole Encounters: Prospects for Ground- and Galaxy-Based Observatories
• Frequency space derivation of linear and non-linear memory gravitational wave signals from eccentric binary orbits
• Stochastic gravitational wave background due to gravitational wave memory
• Extending the frequency reach of pulsar timing array based gravitational wave search without high cadence observations
• Pulsar Timing Array Experiments
• A simple analytic example of the gravitational wave memory effect
• Bayesian search for gravitational wave bursts in pulsar timing array data
• Persistent Astrometric Deflections from Gravitational-Wave Memory
• Nonlinear gravitational-wave memory from cusps and kinks on cosmic strings
• Iterative time-domain method for resolving multiple gravitational wave sources in Pulsar Timing Array data
• Implementation of an efficient Bayesian search for gravitational wave bursts with memory in pulsar timing array data
• Kundt wave geometries in Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity: New solutions and memory effects
• Parameter-Estimation Biases for Eccentric Supermassive Binary Black Holes in Pulsar Timing Arrays: Biases Caused by Ignored Pulsar Terms
• The Science of Fundamental Catalogs
• Memory Effect of Gravitational Wave Pulses in PP-Wave Spacetimes
• Host Galaxy Demographics Of Individually Detectable Supermassive Black-hole Binaries with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Precision Timing of PSR J0437-4715 with the IAR Observatory and Implications for Low-Frequency Gravitational Wave Source Sensitivity
• Framework for describing perturbations to the cosmic microwave background from a gravitational wave burst with memory
• A 4D asymptotically flat rotating black hole solution including supertraslation correction