Nature Communications (Feb 2018)
No tension between assembly models of super massive black hole binaries and pulsar observations
Abstract
Pulsar timing arrays enable the search for the isotropic gravitational-wave (GW) background originating from super massive black hole binary populations, but impose a stringent upper limit on the GW characteristic amplitude. Here, the authors use Bayesian hierarchical modelling applied to a range of astrophysical scenarios to revisit the implications of this upper limit.