Pulsar Timing Array Based Search for Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in the Square Kilometer Array Era

Pulsar Timing Array Based Search for Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in the Square Kilometer Array Era.

The advent of next generation radio telescope facilities, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will usher in an era where a pulsar timing array (PTA) based search for gravitational waves (GWs) will be able to use hundreds of well timed millisecond pulsars rather than the few dozens in existing PTAs. A realistic assessment of the performance of such an extremely large PTA must take into acc...

Science with the Square Kilometer Array

Systematic investigation of the expected gravitational wave signal from supermassive black hole binaries in the pulsar timing band

In this letter we carry out the first systematic investigation of the expected gravitational wave (GW) background generated by supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries in the nHz frequency band accessible to pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). We take from the literature several estimates of the redshift dependent galaxy mass function and of the fraction of close galaxy pairs to derive a wide range of ...

Supermassive Black Hole Binaries as Galactic Blenders

This paper focuses on the dynamical implications of close supermassive black hole binaries both as an example of resonant phase mixing and as a potential explanation of inversions and other anomalous features observed in the luminosity profiles of some elliptical galaxies. The presence of a binary comprised of black holes executing nearly periodic orbits leads to the possibility of a broad reso...

The Square Kilometer Array: New Challenges for Cosmology

In the past three decades our view and understanding of the structure and evolution of the universe has grown in an almost revolutionary fashion. The discovery of the rich variety of patterns displayed by the galaxy distribution, the discovery of streaming motions in the local universe, the detection of tiny variations in the temperature of the microwave background radiation and the use of powe...