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20232026
most citedWhere are NANOGrav's big black holes?

6 citations · 8 across the 7 of their papers we have counts for

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7 papers

astro-ph.CO2026

Anisotropies in the PTA gravitational wave background: what can they teach us about supermassive black hole binaries?

Matias Zaldarriaga, Gabriela Sato-Polito

The gravitational wave background detected by pulsar timing arrays is sourced by a finite population of supermassive black hole binaries, and is therefore anisotropic. We ask what…

astro-ph.CO2026

Summary statistic for pulsar timing arrays

Gabriela Sato-Polito, Matias Zaldarriaga, Barak Zackay

The timing residuals produced by gravitational-wave signals can be described as an incoherent (pulsar term) contribution and a coherent (Earth term) map on the sky, which PTAs meas…

astro-ph.HE2026

A Joint Optimal Search for Gravitational Waves from Resolved and Unresolved Supermassive Binary Black Holes with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Boris Goncharov, Gabriela Sato-Polito, Xiaoming Bi +1

We introduce, from first principles, a joint model of the gravitational wave background (GWB) and brightest supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) sources that may be individually…

astro-ph.GA2025

Uncertainties in the supermassive black hole abundance and implications for the GW background

Gabriela Sato-Polito, Matias Zaldarriaga

The present-day mass function of supermassive black holes is the most important observable quantity for the prediction and theoretical interpretation of the gravitational wave back…

astro-ph.CO2025★ 1 cited

Evolution of SMBHs in light of PTA measurements: implications for growth by mergers and accretion

Gabriela Sato-Polito, Matias Zaldarriaga, Eliot Quataert

We study the growth of supermassive black holes accounting for both accretion and mergers. The former is informed by observations of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) and the la…

astro-ph.CO2024★ 1 cited

The distribution of the gravitational-wave background from supermassive black holes

Gabriela Sato-Polito, Matias Zaldarriaga

The recent detection of gravitational waves (GWs) by pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations spurred a variety of questions regarding the origin of the signal and the properties o…