Journal article
An estimate of the stochastic gravitational wave background from the MassiveBlackII simulation
B Sykes, H Middleton, A Melatos, T Di Matteo, C Degraf, A Bhowmick
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2022
Abstract
A population of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries is expected to generate a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) in the pulsar timing array (PTA) frequency range of 10 -9 to 10 -7 Hz . Detection of this signal is a current observational goal and so predictions of its characteristics are of significant interest. In this work, we use SMBH binary mergers from the MassiveBlackII simulation to estimate the characteristic strain of the stochastic background. We examine both a gravitational wav e (GW) driv en model of binary evolution and a model which also includes the effects of stellar scattering and a circumbinary gas disc. Results are consistent with PTA upper limits and simil..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Ryan Shannon and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) for use of the PPTA upper limit data for comparison. The authors also thank Siyuan Chen for valuable feedback. This work used computational resources of the OzSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. The OzSTAR programme receives funding in part from the Astronomy National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) allocation provided by the Australian Government. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) (project number CE170100004). The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing high performance computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. TDM acknowledges funding from NSF ACI-1614853, NSF AST-1616168, NASA ATP 80NSSC18K101, and NASA ATP NNX17AK56G.