Pulsar timing and the detection of black hole binary systems in globular clusters

Abstract

The possible existence of intermediate mass binary black holes (IMBBHs) in globular clusters (GCs) offers a unique geometry in which to detect space-time oscillations. For certain pulsar-IMBBH configurations possible within a GC, the usual far-field plane wave approximation for the IMBBH metric perturbation severely underestimates the magnitude of the induced pulsar pulse time-of-arrival (TOA) fluctuations. In this letter, the expected TOA fluctuations induced by an IMBBH lying close to the line-of-sight between a pulsar and the Earth are calculated for the first time. For an IMBBH consisting of 10 Msolar and 10^3 Msolar components, a 10 year orbital period, and located 0.1 lyr from the Earth-Pulsar line of sight, the induced pulsar timing residual amplitude will be of order 5 to 500 ns.

arXiv commentAccepted into ApJ Letters. This is a slightly augmented version containing one extra figure

References in corpus (11)

• Intermediate-Mass Black Holes
• Twenty-One Millisecond Pulsars in Terzan 5 Using the Green Bank Telescope
• Observations of 20 millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae at 20 cm
• Strong-Field Tests of Gravity Using Pulsars and Black Holes
• A test of general relativity from the three-dimensional orbital geometry of a binary pulsar
• Pulsars as Tools for Fundamental Physics and Astrophysics
• Gravitational Radiation from Intermediate-Mass Black Holes
• Timing of Millisecond Pulsars in NGC 6752: Evidence for a High Mass-to-Light Ratio in the Cluster Core
• Three Binary Millisecond Pulsars in NGC 6266
• On the Rate of Detectability of Intermediate-Mass Black-Hole Binaries using LISA
• Micro-second Timing of PSR B1821-24 with Chandra/HRC-S

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The stochastic gravitational-wave background from massive black hole binary systems: implications for observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The Astrophysics of Nanohertz Gravitational Waves
• New advances in the Gaussian-process approach to pulsar-timing data analysis
• Detection, Localization and Characterization of Gravitational Wave Bursts in a Pulsar Timing Array
• A coherent method for the detection and estimation of continuous gravitational wave signals using a pulsar timing array
• Pulsar Timing Perturbations from Galactic Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory
• The Gravitational-Wave Discovery Space of Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Stellar-mass black holes in the Hyades star cluster?
• Determining gravitational wave radiation from close galaxy pairs using a binary population synthesis approach
• Extending gravitational wave burst searches with pulsar timing arrays