Journal article
Prospects for gravitational-wave detection and supermassive black hole astrophysics with pulsar timing arrays
V Ravi, JSB Wyithe, RM Shannon, G Hobbs
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Published : 2015
Abstract
Large-area sky surveys show that massive galaxies undergo at least one major merger in a Hubble time. Ongoing pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments are aimed at measuring the gravitational-wave (GW) emission from binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centres of galaxy merger remnants. In this paper, using the latest observational estimates for a range of galaxy properties and scaling relations, we predict the amplitude of the GW background generated by the binary SMBH population. We also predict the numbers of individual binary SMBH GW sources. We predict the characteristic strain amplitude of the GW background to lie in the range 5.1 × 10-16 < Ayr < 2.4 × 10-15 at a frequency of (1..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The authors thank Alberto Sesana for useful discussions and Justin Ellis for sharing results on predicted sensitivity curves. The authors also acknowledge the comments of the anonymous referee, which helped to significantly improve the manuscript. VR is a recipient of a John Stocker Postgraduate Scholarship from the Science and Industry Endowment Fund and JSBW acknowledges an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. GH is supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. This work was performed on the swinSTAR supercomputer at the Swinburne University of Technology.