Plato's view on supermassive black hole binaries: Exploring the faint limit of ESA's Plato space mission

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of ESA's Plato space mission to detect photometric signatures of supermassive black hole binaries, benchmarking its capabilities using simulated data and known candidates like Spikey.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Plato can detect SMBHB signatures in faint quasars, expanding the mission's scientific scope beyond its original design.

Findings

Plato can confirm or rule out Spikey-like SMBHB candidates with G ≤ 18.

Simulations show Plato's ability to recover SMBHB signatures using Bayesian inference.

A catalogue of 12,226 bright quasars was assembled for future SMBHB searches.

Abstract

The search for supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) has, in recent years, seen the dawn of exploration with several hundred candidates claimed from photometric and spectroscopic surveys monitoring AGNs. While only a handful persist to date, the advent of upcoming high-precision wide-field photometric missions motivates continuing the pursuit of confirming SMBHBs in the optical. We explore the possibility of using the ESA Plato space mission to detect photometric signatures of SMBHBs. Motivated by the Kepler observation of Spikey, the best known self-lensing flare (SLF) candidate to date, this work aims to benchmark the scientific outcome if Plato were to observe Spikey-like objects via its Guest Observer programme. Starting from the Gaia database, we assemble a catalogue of 12,226 bright ($G < 19$) high-probability Quasars for the two pointing fields of Plato's nominal mission. This Plato Quasar catalogue will be pivotal for future follow-up observations of larger photometric searches such as the Vera Rubin LSST survey. We use the Plato camera simulator, PlatoSim, to realistically explore the noise budget in Plato's faint limit, while generating mock light curves to benchmark Plato's ability to recover signatures of SMBHBs. We show that, although not at all designed for the purpose, Plato is capable of detecting Spikey-like SMBHB candidates through their relativistic photometric signatures using Bayesian inference and evidence. Plato will in particular be able to confirm or rule out Spikey and Spikey-like objects with a limiting magnitude of $G\leq18$. With a minimum 2-yr baseline per pointing field, we show that Plato not only could play an essential role in future SMBHB research, but may be an integrated part of the observational fleet of continuous high-precision facilities monitoring SMBHB candidates in the near future.