Searching for continuous gravitational waves in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Data Release 3

2025/08/19 by Shi-Yi Zhao, Zhao, Shi-Yi, Zu-Cheng Chen +41 · 1 voice · 2 citations
#gr-qc #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.13944

Abstract

We present results from an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves from individual supermassive binary black holes using the third data release (DR3) of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA). Even though we recover a common-spectrum stochastic process, potentially induced by a nanohertz gravitational wave background, we find no evidence of continuous waves. Therefore, we place upper limits on the gravitational-wave strain amplitude: in the most sensitive frequency range around 10 nHz, we obtain a sky-averaged 95% credibility upper limit of ≈ 7 × 10^-15. Our search is sensitive to supermassive binary black holes with a chirp mass of ≥ 10⁹M_\odot up to a luminosity distance of 50 Mpc for our least sensitive sky direction and 200 Mpc for the most sensitive direction. This work provides at least 4 times better sensitivity in the 1-200 nHz frequency band than our last search based on the PPTA's first data release. We expect that PPTA will continue to play a key role in detecting continuous gravitational waves in the exciting era of nanohertz gravitational wave astronomy.

Citations

• The systemic recoil velocity distribution and the scale height of field millisecond pulsar systems: Implications on neutron star retention fractions in star clusters
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Cited by

• Finite Populations & Finite Time: The Non-Gaussianity of a Gravitational Wave Background
• A Multi-Messenger Search for the Supermassive Black Hole Binary in 3C 66B with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array

Discussions

• New preprint from folks in our team using PPTA datasets. We've started to see evidence of the nanohertz-regime gravitational wave background .... but can we find a single, loud supermassive black hole [bsky, 12 points, 0 comments]

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