The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B

Gabriella Agazie; Zaven Arzoumanian; Paul T. Baker; Bence Bécsy; Laura Blecha; Harsha Blumer; Adam Brazier; Paul R. Brook; Sarah Burke-Spolaor; J. Andrew Casey-Clyde; Maria Charisi; Shami Chatterjee; Belinda D. Cheeseboro; Tyler Cohen; James M. Cordes; Neil J. Cornish; Fronefield Crawford; H. Thankful Cromartie; Megan E. DeCesar; Paul B. Demorest; Lankeswar Dey; Timothy Dolch; Justin A. Ellis; Robert D. Ferdman; Elizabeth C. Ferrara; William Fiore; Emmanuel Fonseca; Gabriel E. Freedman; Nate Garver-Daniels; Peter A. Gentile; Joseph Glaser; Deborah C. Good; Achamveedu Gopakumar; Kayhan Gültekin; Jeffrey S. Hazboun; Ross J. Jennings; Aaron D. Johnson; Megan L. Jones; Andrew R. Kaiser; David L. Kaplan; Luke Zoltan Kelley; Joey S. Key; Nima Laal; Michael T. Lam; William G. Lamb; T. Joseph W. Lazio; Natalia Lewandowska; Tingting Liu; Duncan R. Lorimer; Chiara M. F. Mingarelli; Andrea Mitridate; Cherry Ng; David J. Nice; Stella Koch Ocker; Ken D. Olum; Timothy T. Pennucci; Nihan S. Pol; Henri A. Radovan; Scott M. Ransom; Paul S. Ray; Joseph D. Romano; Shashwat C. Sardesai; Kai Schmitz; Xavier Siemens; Joseph Simon; Magdalena S. Siwek; Sophia V. Sosa Fiscella; Renée Spiewak; Ingrid H. Stairs; Daniel R. Stinebring; Kevin Stovall; Abhimanyu Susobhanan; Joseph K. Swiggum; Stephen R. Taylor; Jacob E. Turner; Caner Unal; Michele Vallisneri; Sarah J. Vigeland; Caitlin A. Witt; Olivia Young; The NANOGrav Collaboration

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61

The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B

Gabriella Agazie, Zaven Arzoumanian, Paul T. Baker, Bence Bécsy, Laura Blecha, Harsha Blumer, Adam Brazier, Paul R. Brook, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, J. Andrew Casey-Clyde, Maria Charisi, Shami Chatterjee, Belinda D. Cheeseboro, Tyler Cohen, James M. Cordes, Neil J. Cornish, Fronefield Crawford, H. Thankful Cromartie, Megan E. DeCesar, Paul B. DemorestLankeswar Dey^*, Timothy Dolch, Justin A. Ellis, Robert D. Ferdman, Elizabeth C. Ferrara, William Fiore, Emmanuel Fonseca, Gabriel E. Freedman, Nate Garver-Daniels, Peter A. Gentile, Joseph Glaser, Deborah C. Good, Achamveedu Gopakumar, Kayhan Gültekin, Jeffrey S. Hazboun, Ross J. Jennings, Aaron D. Johnson, Megan L. Jones, Andrew R. Kaiser, David L. Kaplan, Luke Zoltan Kelley, Joey S. Key, Nima Laal, Michael T. Lam, William G. Lamb, T. Joseph W. Lazio, Natalia Lewandowska, Tingting Liu, Duncan R. Lorimer, Chiara M. F. Mingarelli, Andrea Mitridate, Cherry Ng, David J. Nice, Stella Koch Ocker, Ken D. Olum, Timothy T. Pennucci, Nihan S. Pol, Henri A. Radovan, Scott M. Ransom, Paul S. Ray, Joseph D. Romano, Shashwat C. Sardesai, Kai Schmitz, Xavier Siemens, Joseph Simon, Magdalena S. Siwek, Sophia V. Sosa Fiscella, Renée Spiewak, Ingrid H. Stairs, Daniel R. Stinebring, Kevin Stovall, Abhimanyu Susobhanan, Joseph K. Swiggum, Stephen R. Taylor, Jacob E. Turner, Caner Unal, Michele Vallisneri, Sarah J. Vigeland, Caitlin A. Witt, Olivia Young, The NANOGrav Collaboration

^*Corresponding author for this work

Physics and Astronomy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

27 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The radio galaxy 3C 66B has been hypothesized to host a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) at its center based on electromagnetic observations. Its apparent 1.05 yr period and low redshift (∼0.02) make it an interesting testbed to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) using pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. This source has been subjected to multiple searches for continuous GWs from a circular SMBHB, resulting in progressively more stringent constraints on its GW amplitude and chirp mass. In this paper, we develop a pipeline for performing Bayesian targeted searches for eccentric SMBHBs in PTA data sets, and test its efficacy by applying it to simulated data sets with varying injected signal strengths. We also search for a realistic eccentric SMBHB source in 3C 66B using the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set employing PTA signal models containing Earth term-only as well as Earth+pulsar term contributions using this pipeline. Due to limitations in our PTA signal model, we get meaningful results only when the initial eccentricity e 0 < 0.5 and the symmetric mass ratio η > 0.1. We find no evidence for an eccentric SMBHB signal in our data, and therefore place 95% upper limits on the PTA signal amplitude of 88.1 ± 3.7 ns for the Earth term-only and 81.74 ± 0.86 ns for the Earth+pulsar term searches for e 0 < 0.5 and η > 0.1. Similar 95% upper limits on the chirp mass are (1.98 ± 0.05) × 109 and (1.81 ± 0.01) × 109 M ☉. These upper limits, while less stringent than those calculated from a circular binary search in the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set, are consistent with the SMBHB model of 3C 66B developed from electromagnetic observations.

Original language	English
Article number	144
Journal	The Astrophysical Journal
Volume	963
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61
Publication status	Published - 7 Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments
This work has been carried out by the NANOGrav Collaboration, which receives support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center award numbers 1430284 and 2020265. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement (No. AST-1744119) by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in alliance with Universidad Ana G. Méndez (UAGM) and Yang Enterprises (YEI), Inc. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. We thank the IPTA steering committee for their valuable input on the manuscript. L.D. and A.S. thank Subhajit Dandapat for the useful discussions. L.D. acknowledges the use of the Thorny Flat Supercomputing System at West Virginia University, which is partly funded by the NSF Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) Award #1726534. L.B. acknowledges support from the NSF under award No. AST-1909933 and from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement under Cottrell Scholar Award No. 27553. P.R.B. is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, grant No. ST/W000946/1. S.B. gratefully acknowledges the support of a Sloan Fellowship, and the support of NSF under award #1815664. M.C. and S.R.T. acknowledge support from NSF AST-2007993. M.C. and N.S.P. were supported by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data Intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) Fellowship. Support for this work was provided by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Support for H.T.C. is provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program grant No. HST-HF2-51453.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. M.E.D. acknowledges support from the Naval Research Laboratory by NASA under contract S-15633Y. T.D. and M.T.L. are supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Grant (AAG) award number 2009468. E.C.F. is supported by NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. G.E.F., S.C.S., and S.J.V. are supported by NSF award PHY-2011772. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. A.D.J. and M.V. acknowledge support from the Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory President's and Director's Research and Development Fund. A.D.J. acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation. The work of N.La. and X.S. is partly supported by the George and Hannah Bolinger Memorial Fund in the College of Science at Oregon State University. N.La. acknowledges the support from Larry W. Martin and Joyce B. O'Neill Endowed Fellowship in the College of Science at Oregon State University. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). D.R.L. and M.A.M. are supported by NSF #1458952. M.A.M. is supported by NSF #2009425. C.M.F.M. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants Nos. NSF PHY-1748958 and AST-2106552. A.Mi. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany's Excellence Strategy—EXC 2121 Quantum Universe—390833306. The Dunlap Institute is funded by an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. K.D.O. was supported in part by NSF grant No. 2207267. T.T.P. acknowledges support from the Extragalactic Astrophysics Research Group at Eötvös Lorönd University, funded by the Eötvös Lorönd Research Network (ELKH), which was used during the development of this research. S.M.R. and I.H.S. are CIFAR Fellows. Portions of this work performed at NRL were supported by ONR 6.1 basic research funding. J.D.R. also acknowledges support from start-up funds from Texas Tech University. J.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award No. AST-2202388, and acknowledges previous support by the NSF under award No. 1847938. Pulsar research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by CIFAR. S.R.T. acknowledges support from an NSF CAREER award #2146016. C.U. acknowledges support from BGU (Kreitman fellowship), and the Council for Higher Education and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Excellence fellowship). C.A.W. acknowledges support from CIERA, the Adler Planetarium, and the Brinson Foundation through a CIERA-Adler postdoctoral fellowship. O.Y. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-2139292. A.G. acknowledges the support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project identification No. RTI 4002. We thank the anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions.

Keywords

Gravitational waves
Millisecond pulsars
Supermassive black holes

Access to Document

10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)

AgazieG2024NANOGray.pdfFinal published version, 9.44 MBLicence: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)

Astrophysics at the University of Birmingham - Consolidated grant 2022-2025
Moore, C. (Co-Investigator) & Vecchio, A. (Principal Investigator)
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL
1/04/22 → 31/12/25
Project: Research Councils

Cite this

Agazie, G., Arzoumanian, Z., Baker, P. T., Bécsy, B., Blecha, L., Blumer, H., Brazier, A., Brook, P. R., Burke-Spolaor, S., Casey-Clyde, J. A., Charisi, M., Chatterjee, S., Cheeseboro, B. D., Cohen, T., Cordes, J. M., Cornish, N. J., Crawford, F., Cromartie, H. T., DeCesar, M. E., ... The NANOGrav Collaboration (2024). The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B. The Astrophysical Journal, 963(2), Article 144. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61

@article{2a9065f025a24daca3e7bb609febc318,

title = "The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B",

abstract = "The radio galaxy 3C 66B has been hypothesized to host a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) at its center based on electromagnetic observations. Its apparent 1.05 yr period and low redshift (∼0.02) make it an interesting testbed to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) using pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. This source has been subjected to multiple searches for continuous GWs from a circular SMBHB, resulting in progressively more stringent constraints on its GW amplitude and chirp mass. In this paper, we develop a pipeline for performing Bayesian targeted searches for eccentric SMBHBs in PTA data sets, and test its efficacy by applying it to simulated data sets with varying injected signal strengths. We also search for a realistic eccentric SMBHB source in 3C 66B using the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set employing PTA signal models containing Earth term-only as well as Earth+pulsar term contributions using this pipeline. Due to limitations in our PTA signal model, we get meaningful results only when the initial eccentricity e 0 < 0.5 and the symmetric mass ratio η > 0.1. We find no evidence for an eccentric SMBHB signal in our data, and therefore place 95% upper limits on the PTA signal amplitude of 88.1 ± 3.7 ns for the Earth term-only and 81.74 ± 0.86 ns for the Earth+pulsar term searches for e 0 < 0.5 and η > 0.1. Similar 95% upper limits on the chirp mass are (1.98 ± 0.05) × 109 and (1.81 ± 0.01) × 109 M ☉. These upper limits, while less stringent than those calculated from a circular binary search in the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set, are consistent with the SMBHB model of 3C 66B developed from electromagnetic observations.",

keywords = "Gravitational waves, Millisecond pulsars, Supermassive black holes",

author = "Gabriella Agazie and Zaven Arzoumanian and Baker, {Paul T.} and Bence B{\'e}csy and Laura Blecha and Harsha Blumer and Adam Brazier and Brook, {Paul R.} and Sarah Burke-Spolaor and Casey-Clyde, {J. Andrew} and Maria Charisi and Shami Chatterjee and Cheeseboro, {Belinda D.} and Tyler Cohen and Cordes, {James M.} and Cornish, {Neil J.} and Fronefield Crawford and Cromartie, {H. Thankful} and DeCesar, {Megan E.} and Demorest, {Paul B.} and Lankeswar Dey and Timothy Dolch and Ellis, {Justin A.} and Ferdman, {Robert D.} and Ferrara, {Elizabeth C.} and William Fiore and Emmanuel Fonseca and Freedman, {Gabriel E.} and Nate Garver-Daniels and Gentile, {Peter A.} and Joseph Glaser and Good, {Deborah C.} and Achamveedu Gopakumar and Kayhan G{\"u}ltekin and Hazboun, {Jeffrey S.} and Jennings, {Ross J.} and Johnson, {Aaron D.} and Jones, {Megan L.} and Kaiser, {Andrew R.} and Kaplan, {David L.} and Kelley, {Luke Zoltan} and Key, {Joey S.} and Nima Laal and Lam, {Michael T.} and Lamb, {William G.} and {W. Lazio}, {T. Joseph} and Natalia Lewandowska and Tingting Liu and Lorimer, {Duncan R.} and Mingarelli, {Chiara M. F.} and Andrea Mitridate and Cherry Ng and Nice, {David J.} and Ocker, {Stella Koch} and Olum, {Ken D.} and Pennucci, {Timothy T.} and Pol, {Nihan S.} and Radovan, {Henri A.} and Ransom, {Scott M.} and Ray, {Paul S.} and Romano, {Joseph D.} and Sardesai, {Shashwat C.} and Kai Schmitz and Xavier Siemens and Joseph Simon and Siwek, {Magdalena S.} and {Sosa Fiscella}, {Sophia V.} and Ren{\'e}e Spiewak and Stairs, {Ingrid H.} and Stinebring, {Daniel R.} and Kevin Stovall and Abhimanyu Susobhanan and Swiggum, {Joseph K.} and Taylor, {Stephen R.} and Turner, {Jacob E.} and Caner Unal and Michele Vallisneri and Vigeland, {Sarah J.} and Witt, {Caitlin A.} and Olivia Young and {The NANOGrav Collaboration}",

note = "Acknowledgments This work has been carried out by the NANOGrav Collaboration, which receives support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center award numbers 1430284 and 2020265. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement (No. AST-1744119) by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in alliance with Universidad Ana G. M{\'e}ndez (UAGM) and Yang Enterprises (YEI), Inc. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. We thank the IPTA steering committee for their valuable input on the manuscript. L.D. and A.S. thank Subhajit Dandapat for the useful discussions. L.D. acknowledges the use of the Thorny Flat Supercomputing System at West Virginia University, which is partly funded by the NSF Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) Award #1726534. L.B. acknowledges support from the NSF under award No. AST-1909933 and from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement under Cottrell Scholar Award No. 27553. P.R.B. is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, grant No. ST/W000946/1. S.B. gratefully acknowledges the support of a Sloan Fellowship, and the support of NSF under award #1815664. M.C. and S.R.T. acknowledge support from NSF AST-2007993. M.C. and N.S.P. were supported by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data Intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) Fellowship. Support for this work was provided by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Support for H.T.C. is provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program grant No. HST-HF2-51453.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. M.E.D. acknowledges support from the Naval Research Laboratory by NASA under contract S-15633Y. T.D. and M.T.L. are supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Grant (AAG) award number 2009468. E.C.F. is supported by NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. G.E.F., S.C.S., and S.J.V. are supported by NSF award PHY-2011772. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. A.D.J. and M.V. acknowledge support from the Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory President's and Director's Research and Development Fund. A.D.J. acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation. The work of N.La. and X.S. is partly supported by the George and Hannah Bolinger Memorial Fund in the College of Science at Oregon State University. N.La. acknowledges the support from Larry W. Martin and Joyce B. O'Neill Endowed Fellowship in the College of Science at Oregon State University. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). D.R.L. and M.A.M. are supported by NSF #1458952. M.A.M. is supported by NSF #2009425. C.M.F.M. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants Nos. NSF PHY-1748958 and AST-2106552. A.Mi. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany's Excellence Strategy—EXC 2121 Quantum Universe—390833306. The Dunlap Institute is funded by an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. K.D.O. was supported in part by NSF grant No. 2207267. T.T.P. acknowledges support from the Extragalactic Astrophysics Research Group at E{\"o}tv{\"o}s Lor{\"o}nd University, funded by the E{\"o}tv{\"o}s Lor{\"o}nd Research Network (ELKH), which was used during the development of this research. S.M.R. and I.H.S. are CIFAR Fellows. Portions of this work performed at NRL were supported by ONR 6.1 basic research funding. J.D.R. also acknowledges support from start-up funds from Texas Tech University. J.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award No. AST-2202388, and acknowledges previous support by the NSF under award No. 1847938. Pulsar research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by CIFAR. S.R.T. acknowledges support from an NSF CAREER award #2146016. C.U. acknowledges support from BGU (Kreitman fellowship), and the Council for Higher Education and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Excellence fellowship). C.A.W. acknowledges support from CIERA, the Adler Planetarium, and the Brinson Foundation through a CIERA-Adler postdoctoral fellowship. O.Y. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-2139292. A.G. acknowledges the support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project identification No. RTI 4002. We thank the anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions.",

year = "2024",

month = mar,

day = "7",

doi = "10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61",

language = "English",

volume = "963",

journal = "The Astrophysical Journal",

issn = "0004-637X",

publisher = "Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd",

number = "2",

}

Agazie, G, Arzoumanian, Z, Baker, PT, Bécsy, B, Blecha, L, Blumer, H, Brazier, A, Brook, PR, Burke-Spolaor, S, Casey-Clyde, JA, Charisi, M, Chatterjee, S, Cheeseboro, BD, Cohen, T, Cordes, JM, Cornish, NJ, Crawford, F, Cromartie, HT, DeCesar, ME, Demorest, PB, Dey, L, Dolch, T, Ellis, JA, Ferdman, RD, Ferrara, EC, Fiore, W, Fonseca, E, Freedman, GE, Garver-Daniels, N, Gentile, PA, Glaser, J, Good, DC, Gopakumar, A, Gültekin, K, Hazboun, JS, Jennings, RJ, Johnson, AD, Jones, ML, Kaiser, AR, Kaplan, DL, Kelley, LZ, Key, JS, Laal, N, Lam, MT, Lamb, WG, W. Lazio, TJ, Lewandowska, N, Liu, T, Lorimer, DR, Mingarelli, CMF, Mitridate, A, Ng, C, Nice, DJ, Ocker, SK, Olum, KD, Pennucci, TT, Pol, NS, Radovan, HA, Ransom, SM, Ray, PS, Romano, JD, Sardesai, SC, Schmitz, K, Siemens, X, Simon, J, Siwek, MS, Sosa Fiscella, SV, Spiewak, R, Stairs, IH, Stinebring, DR, Stovall, K, Susobhanan, A, Swiggum, JK, Taylor, SR, Turner, JE, Unal, C, Vallisneri, M, Vigeland, SJ, Witt, CA, Young, O & The NANOGrav Collaboration 2024, 'The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B', The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 963, no. 2, 144. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61

TY - JOUR

T1 - The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set

T2 - A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B

AU - Agazie, Gabriella

AU - Arzoumanian, Zaven

AU - Baker, Paul T.

AU - Bécsy, Bence

AU - Blecha, Laura

AU - Blumer, Harsha

AU - Brazier, Adam

AU - Brook, Paul R.

AU - Burke-Spolaor, Sarah

AU - Casey-Clyde, J. Andrew

AU - Charisi, Maria

AU - Chatterjee, Shami

AU - Cheeseboro, Belinda D.

AU - Cohen, Tyler

AU - Cordes, James M.

AU - Cornish, Neil J.

AU - Crawford, Fronefield

AU - Cromartie, H. Thankful

AU - DeCesar, Megan E.

AU - Demorest, Paul B.

AU - Dey, Lankeswar

AU - Dolch, Timothy

AU - Ellis, Justin A.

AU - Ferdman, Robert D.

AU - Ferrara, Elizabeth C.

AU - Fiore, William

AU - Fonseca, Emmanuel

AU - Freedman, Gabriel E.

AU - Garver-Daniels, Nate

AU - Gentile, Peter A.

AU - Glaser, Joseph

AU - Good, Deborah C.

AU - Gopakumar, Achamveedu

AU - Gültekin, Kayhan

AU - Hazboun, Jeffrey S.

AU - Jennings, Ross J.

AU - Johnson, Aaron D.

AU - Jones, Megan L.

AU - Kaiser, Andrew R.

AU - Kaplan, David L.

AU - Kelley, Luke Zoltan

AU - Key, Joey S.

AU - Laal, Nima

AU - Lam, Michael T.

AU - Lamb, William G.

AU - W. Lazio, T. Joseph

AU - Lewandowska, Natalia

AU - Liu, Tingting

AU - Lorimer, Duncan R.

AU - Mingarelli, Chiara M. F.

AU - Mitridate, Andrea

AU - Ng, Cherry

AU - Nice, David J.

AU - Ocker, Stella Koch

AU - Olum, Ken D.

AU - Pennucci, Timothy T.

AU - Pol, Nihan S.

AU - Radovan, Henri A.

AU - Ransom, Scott M.

AU - Ray, Paul S.

AU - Romano, Joseph D.

AU - Sardesai, Shashwat C.

AU - Schmitz, Kai

AU - Siemens, Xavier

AU - Simon, Joseph

AU - Siwek, Magdalena S.

AU - Sosa Fiscella, Sophia V.

AU - Spiewak, Renée

AU - Stairs, Ingrid H.

AU - Stinebring, Daniel R.

AU - Stovall, Kevin

AU - Susobhanan, Abhimanyu

AU - Swiggum, Joseph K.

AU - Taylor, Stephen R.

AU - Turner, Jacob E.

AU - Unal, Caner

AU - Vallisneri, Michele

AU - Vigeland, Sarah J.

AU - Witt, Caitlin A.

AU - Young, Olivia

AU - The NANOGrav Collaboration

N1 - Acknowledgments This work has been carried out by the NANOGrav Collaboration, which receives support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center award numbers 1430284 and 2020265. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement (No. AST-1744119) by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in alliance with Universidad Ana G. Méndez (UAGM) and Yang Enterprises (YEI), Inc. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. We thank the IPTA steering committee for their valuable input on the manuscript. L.D. and A.S. thank Subhajit Dandapat for the useful discussions. L.D. acknowledges the use of the Thorny Flat Supercomputing System at West Virginia University, which is partly funded by the NSF Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) Award #1726534. L.B. acknowledges support from the NSF under award No. AST-1909933 and from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement under Cottrell Scholar Award No. 27553. P.R.B. is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, grant No. ST/W000946/1. S.B. gratefully acknowledges the support of a Sloan Fellowship, and the support of NSF under award #1815664. M.C. and S.R.T. acknowledge support from NSF AST-2007993. M.C. and N.S.P. were supported by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data Intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) Fellowship. Support for this work was provided by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Support for H.T.C. is provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program grant No. HST-HF2-51453.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. M.E.D. acknowledges support from the Naval Research Laboratory by NASA under contract S-15633Y. T.D. and M.T.L. are supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Grant (AAG) award number 2009468. E.C.F. is supported by NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. G.E.F., S.C.S., and S.J.V. are supported by NSF award PHY-2011772. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. A.D.J. and M.V. acknowledge support from the Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory President's and Director's Research and Development Fund. A.D.J. acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation. The work of N.La. and X.S. is partly supported by the George and Hannah Bolinger Memorial Fund in the College of Science at Oregon State University. N.La. acknowledges the support from Larry W. Martin and Joyce B. O'Neill Endowed Fellowship in the College of Science at Oregon State University. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). D.R.L. and M.A.M. are supported by NSF #1458952. M.A.M. is supported by NSF #2009425. C.M.F.M. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants Nos. NSF PHY-1748958 and AST-2106552. A.Mi. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany's Excellence Strategy—EXC 2121 Quantum Universe—390833306. The Dunlap Institute is funded by an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. K.D.O. was supported in part by NSF grant No. 2207267. T.T.P. acknowledges support from the Extragalactic Astrophysics Research Group at Eötvös Lorönd University, funded by the Eötvös Lorönd Research Network (ELKH), which was used during the development of this research. S.M.R. and I.H.S. are CIFAR Fellows. Portions of this work performed at NRL were supported by ONR 6.1 basic research funding. J.D.R. also acknowledges support from start-up funds from Texas Tech University. J.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award No. AST-2202388, and acknowledges previous support by the NSF under award No. 1847938. Pulsar research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by CIFAR. S.R.T. acknowledges support from an NSF CAREER award #2146016. C.U. acknowledges support from BGU (Kreitman fellowship), and the Council for Higher Education and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Excellence fellowship). C.A.W. acknowledges support from CIERA, the Adler Planetarium, and the Brinson Foundation through a CIERA-Adler postdoctoral fellowship. O.Y. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-2139292. A.G. acknowledges the support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project identification No. RTI 4002. We thank the anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions.

PY - 2024/3/7

Y1 - 2024/3/7

N2 - The radio galaxy 3C 66B has been hypothesized to host a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) at its center based on electromagnetic observations. Its apparent 1.05 yr period and low redshift (∼0.02) make it an interesting testbed to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) using pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. This source has been subjected to multiple searches for continuous GWs from a circular SMBHB, resulting in progressively more stringent constraints on its GW amplitude and chirp mass. In this paper, we develop a pipeline for performing Bayesian targeted searches for eccentric SMBHBs in PTA data sets, and test its efficacy by applying it to simulated data sets with varying injected signal strengths. We also search for a realistic eccentric SMBHB source in 3C 66B using the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set employing PTA signal models containing Earth term-only as well as Earth+pulsar term contributions using this pipeline. Due to limitations in our PTA signal model, we get meaningful results only when the initial eccentricity e 0 < 0.5 and the symmetric mass ratio η > 0.1. We find no evidence for an eccentric SMBHB signal in our data, and therefore place 95% upper limits on the PTA signal amplitude of 88.1 ± 3.7 ns for the Earth term-only and 81.74 ± 0.86 ns for the Earth+pulsar term searches for e 0 < 0.5 and η > 0.1. Similar 95% upper limits on the chirp mass are (1.98 ± 0.05) × 109 and (1.81 ± 0.01) × 109 M ☉. These upper limits, while less stringent than those calculated from a circular binary search in the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set, are consistent with the SMBHB model of 3C 66B developed from electromagnetic observations.

AB - The radio galaxy 3C 66B has been hypothesized to host a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) at its center based on electromagnetic observations. Its apparent 1.05 yr period and low redshift (∼0.02) make it an interesting testbed to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) using pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. This source has been subjected to multiple searches for continuous GWs from a circular SMBHB, resulting in progressively more stringent constraints on its GW amplitude and chirp mass. In this paper, we develop a pipeline for performing Bayesian targeted searches for eccentric SMBHBs in PTA data sets, and test its efficacy by applying it to simulated data sets with varying injected signal strengths. We also search for a realistic eccentric SMBHB source in 3C 66B using the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set employing PTA signal models containing Earth term-only as well as Earth+pulsar term contributions using this pipeline. Due to limitations in our PTA signal model, we get meaningful results only when the initial eccentricity e 0 < 0.5 and the symmetric mass ratio η > 0.1. We find no evidence for an eccentric SMBHB signal in our data, and therefore place 95% upper limits on the PTA signal amplitude of 88.1 ± 3.7 ns for the Earth term-only and 81.74 ± 0.86 ns for the Earth+pulsar term searches for e 0 < 0.5 and η > 0.1. Similar 95% upper limits on the chirp mass are (1.98 ± 0.05) × 109 and (1.81 ± 0.01) × 109 M ☉. These upper limits, while less stringent than those calculated from a circular binary search in the NANOGrav 12.5 yr data set, are consistent with the SMBHB model of 3C 66B developed from electromagnetic observations.

KW - Gravitational waves

KW - Millisecond pulsars

KW - Supermassive black holes

U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61

DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f61

M3 - Article

SN - 0004-637X

VL - 963

JO - The Astrophysical Journal

JF - The Astrophysical Journal

IS - 2

M1 - 144

ER -

The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: A Computationally Efficient Eccentric Binary Search Pipeline and Constraints on an Eccentric Supermassive Binary Candidate in 3C 66B

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access to Document

Fingerprint

Projects

Astrophysics at the University of Birmingham - Consolidated grant 2022-2025

Cite this