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Constraining Supermassive Black Hole Binary Dynamics Using Pulsar Timing Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

J. A. Ellis  and
for the NANOGrav Collaboration
J. A. Ellis
Affiliation:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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The most likely sources of nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs) are supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of merging galaxies. A stochastic superposition of GWs from these sources is expected to produce a stochastic GW background that will leave a unique signature in the correlations of arrival times of pulses from a collection of radio pulsars. Using the 9-year data release from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration, we perform the first analysis that places constraints on the amplitude and shape of the stochastic GW background. We find that the data favor a turn over in the GW strain spectrum for current models of SMBH merger rates. This result indicates that environmental factors, other than GWs from circular binaries, are influencing the GW spectrum. Furthermore, we map constraints on the spectral shape to constraints on various environmental factors that drive the binary to the GW-driven regime including the stellar mass density for stellar-scattering, mass accretion rate for circumbinary disk interaction, and orbital eccentricity for eccentric binaries.

Keywords

PulsarsGravitational Waves
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 11 , General Assembly A29B: Astronomy in Focus , August 2015 , pp. 336 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

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