Probing the Delay Time of Supermassive Black Hole Binary Mergers With Gravitational Waves [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14509


Merging supermassive black hole binaries is expected as a possible consequence of galaxy mergers, yet the detailed evolution path and underlying mechanisms of these binaries are still subject to large theoretical uncertainties. In this work, we propose to combine the (future) gravitational wave measurements of supermassive black hole binary merger events with the galaxy merger rate distributions from large-scale surveys/cosmological simulations, to infer the delay time of binary mergers, as a function of binary mass. The delay time encodes key information about binary evolution, which can be used to test the predictions of various evolution models. With a mock data set of supermassive black hole binary merger events, we discuss how to infer the distribution of delay time with hierarchical Bayesian inference and test evolution models with the Bayesian model selection method.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Fang and H. Yang
Thu, 6 Oct 22
71/77

Comments: 14 pages, 10 figures