Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Quasars can Signpost Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2405.19406 v2 pith:KR52IFJI submitted 2024-05-29 astro-ph.HE astro-ph.GA

classification astro-ph.HEastro-ph.GA
keywords quasarsblackgalaxymergerssupermassivebinariesfindfound
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are found in the centers of massive galaxies, and galaxy mergers should eventually lead to SMBH mergers. Quasar activity has long been associated with galaxy mergers, so here we investigate if supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are preferentially found in quasars. Our multimessenger investigation folds together a gravitational wave background signal from NANOGrav, a sample of periodic AGN candidates from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, and a quasar mass function, to estimate an upper limit on the fraction of quasars which could host a SMBHB. We find at 95\% confidence that quasars are at most five times as likely to host a SMBHB as a random galaxy. Pulsar timing arrays may therefore be more likely to find SMBHBs by prioritizing quasars over a random selection of galaxies in their searches.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Bias from small-scale leakage in Pulsar Timing Array maps

    astro-ph.IM 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Unmodeled small-scale gravitational-wave power systematically inflates reconstructed large-scale angular power spectra in pulsar timing array anisotropy searches.

  2. Multi-Tracer Correlated Stacking: A Novel Way to Discover Anisotropy in nano-Hz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background

    astro-ph.CO 2025-01 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A stacking statistic over galaxy-overdense pixels distinguishes simulated isotropic from AGN-traced anisotropic nanohertz gravitational-wave backgrounds.

  3. Can quasars, triggered by mergers, account for NANOGrav's stochastic gravitational wave background?

    astro-ph.CO 2024-12 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Using the observed quasar luminosity function, the authors show that quasar-associated black hole mergers can reproduce the NANOGrav gravitational wave background if quasar lifetimes are near 3e7 years and most quasar...

  4. The SKAO Pulsar Timing Array

    astro-ph.IM 2026-07 accept novelty 3.5 of 10

    An SKAO PTA with ~174 millisecond pulsars can dominate nanohertz GW sensitivity within four years and enable continuous-wave detections plus anisotropy maps of the gravitational-wave background.

Pith tools