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Astrometric Search Method for Individually Resolvable Gravitational Wave Sources with Gaia.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Moore, Christopher J 
Mihaylov, Deyan P 

Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) cause the apparent position of distant stars to oscillate with a characteristic pattern on the sky. Astrometric measurements (e.g., those made by Gaia) provide a new way to search for GWs. The main difficulty facing such a search is the large size of the data set; Gaia observes more than one billion stars. In this Letter the problem of searching for GWs from individually resolvable supermassive black hole binaries using astrometry is addressed for the first time; it is demonstrated how the data set can be compressed by a factor of more than 10^{6}, with a loss of sensitivity of less than 1%. This technique was successfully used to recover artificially injected GW signals from mock Gaia data and to assess the GW sensitivity of Gaia. Throughout the Letter the complementarity of Gaia and pulsar timing searches for GWs is highlighted.

Description

Keywords

astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.GA, gr-qc

Journal Title

Phys Rev Lett

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0031-9007
1079-7114

Volume Title

119

Publisher

American Physical Society (APS)
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/L000636/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/K00333X/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/H008586/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/P000673/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/J005673/1)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Marie Sk?odowska-Curie actions (690904)