A noise independent method of measuring sky location and chirp mass of gravitational waves single sources, using non-simultaneously timing of pulsars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for measuring sky location and chirp mass of gravitational wave sources using non-simultaneous pulsar timing data, effective even with low SNR and small PTA arrays.

Contribution

A new parameter estimation technique that utilizes only frequency data from pulsar timing residuals, independent of SNR and noise form, for resolving SMBHB sources.

Findings

Sky location accuracy ~800 deg^2

Chirp mass relative error ~50%

Effective for small PTAs and low SNR scenarios

Abstract

We propose a new method to measure parameters of SMBHBs as individual resolvable evolving single GWs sources, using the timing data of three or more non-simultaneous pulsars. These parameters include the sky position of the SMBHB and a chirp mass-red shift combination M_c(1+z). This method requires both the Earth term and the pulsar terms observed in the power spectra of timing residuals. The method takes only the frequencies values, thus the accuracy of parameters estimation is not dependent with SNR nor the form of timing noises. We applied our method to simulated timing data of three pulsars to check its validity, the GWs sources location can be constrained with an accuracy \Delta\Omega~800deg^2, the chirp mass can be determined with a relative error of ~50%. Our method works better than previous method, when the size of PTA is small and the SNR of individual pulsar is low, which is likely the case of near future. In case of large array and how SNR in far future, our method can provide good prior parameters distribution for Bayesian inference.