Quasars Can Signpost Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

Abstract

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are found in the centers of massive galaxies, and galaxy mergers should eventually lead to SMBH mergers. Quasar activity has long been associated with galaxy mergers, so here we investigate if supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are preferentially found in quasars. Our multimessenger investigation folds together a gravitational-wave background signal from NANOGrav, a sample of periodic active galactic nucleus candidates from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, and a quasar mass function, to estimate an upper limit on the fraction of quasars which could host an SMBHB. We find at 95% confidence that quasars are at most 5 times as likely to host an SMBHB as a random galaxy. Pulsar timing arrays may therefore be more likely to find SMBHBs by prioritizing quasars over a random selection of galaxies in their searches.

Keywords

• Gravitational wave astronomy
• Gravitational waves
• Quasars
• Supermassive black holes