Gravitational waves from an SMBH binary in M87

TL;DR

This paper explores the gravitational waves from a hypothetical supermassive black-hole binary in M87, proposing a new detection method for low-frequency GWs and analyzing their potential to reveal details about the galaxy's center.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to detect low-frequency gravitational waves from SMBH binaries using pulsar spin-down rates, considering observational constraints and the binary's orbital parameters.

Findings

GW frequency is too low for conventional pulsar timing arrays

Proposed a new method to detect low-frequency GWs via pulsar spin-down rates

GWs from the SMBH binary are extremely hard to detect with current methods

Abstract

In this paper, we study gravitational-wave (GW) emission from a hypothetical supermassive black-hole (SMBH) binary at the center of M87. The existence of a SMBH other than that usually identified with the central AGN is a possible explanation for the observed displacement ($\sim O(1)~{\rm pc}$) between the AGN and the galactic centroid, and it is reasonable to assume consid- ering the evolution of SMBHs through galaxy mergers. Because the period of the binary and the resulting GWs is much longer than the observational time span, we calculate the variation of the GW amplitude, rather than the amplitude itself. We investigate the dependence on the orbital elements and the second BH mass taking the observational constraints into account. The frequency of the GWs is too low to be detected with the conventional pulsar timing array and we propose a new method to detect such low-frequency GWs with the distribution func- tion of pulsar spin-down rates. Although the GWs from a SMBH binary which explains the observed displacement is extremely hard to be detected even with the new method, GWs are still a useful way to probe the M87 center.