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Gravitational Waves from SMBH Binaries in Light of the NANOGrav 15-Year Data

7 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

7 Pith papers citing it
abstract

The NANOGrav Collaboration has recently announced evidence for nHz gravitational waves (GWs), in the form of a Hellings-Downs angular correlation in the common-spectrum process that had been observed previously by them and other Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs). We analyze the possibility that these GWs originate from binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with total masses $\gtrsim 10^9\, M_{\odot}$. The spectral index of the GW signal differs at 95 % CL from that predicted for binary evolution by GW emission alone, and we find $> 3 \sigma$ evidence that environmental effects such as dynamical friction with gas, stars, and dark matter may be affecting the binary evolution. We estimate the required magnitude and spectrum of such environmental effects and comment on their possible implications for measurements of GWs at higher frequencies.

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2026 6 2025 1

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representative citing papers

A practical theorem on gravitational-wave background statistics

astro-ph.CO · 2026-04-21 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

For large but finite source counts, the PDF of rescaled GWB characteristic strain squared follows the universal form N^{1/3} times the reflected map-Airy distribution evaluated at N^{1/3}(y-1), fully determined by the mean strain and a new cubic shot-noise scale.

Population statistics of nanohertz gravitational wave sources

astro-ph.HE · 2026-07-08 · conditional · novelty 6.0

A hierarchical Bayesian inference framework combining free-spectrum reconstruction with population-level likelihoods distinguishes finite SMBHB populations from Gaussian primordial GWB using mock PTA data.

Constraints on the inflationary vacuum and reheating era from NANOGrav

astro-ph.CO · 2026-05-06 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

NANOGrav data favors a blue-tilted tensor spectrum with nt ≈ 2.2, radiation-dominated reheating, and alpha-vacuum states over standard Bunch-Davies, with a frequency-dependent alpha suggested to resolve the blue-tilt tension.

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