http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08087
Pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments are becoming increasingly sensitive to gravitational waves (GWs) in the nanohertz frequency range, where the main astrophysical sources are the supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) which are expected to reside in the centers of galaxies. Some of these individual SMBHBs may power active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and thus their binary parameters could be obtained electromagnetically, which makes it possible to apply electromagnetic (EM) information to aid the search for a GW signal in PTA data. In this work, we investigate the effects of such an EM-informed search on binary detection and parameter estimation by performing mock data analyses on simulated PTA datasets. We find that by applying EM priors, the Bayes factor of the signal increases by a factor of a few to an order of magnitude, and thus an EM-informed targeted search is able to find hints of a signal when an uninformed search fails to find any. By combining EM and GW data, one can achieve an overall improvement in parameter estimation, regardless of the source’s sky location or GW frequency. We discuss the implications for the multimessenger studies of SMBHBs with PTAs.
T. Liu and S. Vigeland
Wed, 19 May 21
16/64
Comments: 19 pages, 11 figures, 5 tables; submitted to ApJ