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A Periodically Varying Luminous Quasar at z = 2 from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey: A Candidate Supermassive Black Hole Binary in the Gravitational Wave-Driven Regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

Tingting Liu  and
Suvi Gezari
Tingting Liu
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA email: tingting@astro.umd.edu
Suvi Gezari
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA email: tingting@astro.umd.edu
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Abstract

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Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) should be an inevitable consequence of the hierarchical growth of massive galaxies through mergers and the strongest sirens of gravitational waves (GWs) in the cosmos. Yet, their direct detection has remained elusive due to the compact (sub-parsec) orbital separations of gravitationally bound SMBHBs. Here we exploit a theoretically predicted signature of SMBHBs in the time domain. We have begun a systematic search for SMBHB candidates in the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey (MDS) and reported our first significant detection of such a candidate from our pilot study of MD09 in Liu et al. (2015). Our candidate PSO J334.2028+01.4075 has a detected period of 542 days, varying persistently over the available baseline. From its archival spectrum, we estimated the black hole mass of the z = 2.06 quasar to be ∼1010 M⊙. The inferred ∼7 Rs binary separation therefore puts this candidate in the regime of GW-dominated orbital decay, opening up the exciting possibility of finding GW sources detectable by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) in a wide-field optical synoptic survey.

Keywords

black hole physicsquasars: individual
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 11 , General Assembly A29B: Astronomy in Focus , August 2015 , pp. 354 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

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