Prospects for future binary black hole gravitational wave studies in light of PTA measurements

Abstract

NANOGrav and other Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) have discovered a common-spectrum process in the nHz range that may be due to gravitational waves (GWs): if so, they are likely to have been generated by black hole (BH) binaries with total masses > 109 M⊙. Using the Extended Press-Schechter formalism to model the galactic halo mass function and a simple relation between the halo and BH masses suggests that these binaries have redshifts z = 𝒪(1) and mass ratios ≳10, and that the GW signal at frequencies above 𝒪(10) nHz may be dominated by relatively few binaries that could be distinguished experimentally and would yield observable circular polarization. Extrapolating the model to higher frequencies indicates that future GW detectors such as LISA and AEDGE could extend the PTA observations to lower BH masses ≳103 M⊙.