NANOGrav Constraints on Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory

Arzoumanian, Z. and Brazier, A. and Burke-Spolaor, S. and Chamberlin, S. J. and Chatterjee, S. and Christy, B. and Cordes, J. M. and Cornish, N. J. and Demorest, P. B. and Deng, X. and Dolch, T. and Ellis, J. A. and Ferdman, R. D. and Fonseca, E. and Garver-Daniels, N. and Jenet, F. and Jones, G. and Kaspi, V. M. and Koop, M. and Lam, M. T. and Lazio, T. J. W. and Levin, L. and Lommen, A. N. and Lorimer, D. R. and Luo, J. and Lynch, R. S. and Madison, D. R. and McLaughlin, M. A. and McWilliams, S. T. and Nice, D. J. and Pennucci, Timothy Thomas (2015) NANOGrav Constraints on Gravitational Wave Bursts with Memory. ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 810 (2). ISSN 1538-4357

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Abstract

Among efforts to detect gravitational radiation, pulsar timing arrays are uniquely poised to de- tect “memory” signatures, permanent perturbations in spacetime from highly energetic astrophysical events such as mergers of supermassive black hole binaries. The North American Nanohertz Obser- vatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) observes dozens of the most stable millisecond pulsars using the Arecibo and Green Bank radio telescopes in an effort to study, among other things, grav- itational wave memory. We herein present the results of a search for gravitational wave bursts with memory (BWMs) using the first five years of NANOGrav observations. We develop original methods for dramatically speeding up searches for BWM signals. In the directions of the sky where our sen- sitivity to BWMs is best, we would detect mergers of binaries with reduced masses of 109 M out to distances of 30 Mpc; such massive mergers in the Virgo cluster would be marginally detectable. We find no evidence for BWMs. However, with our non-detection, we set upper limits on the rate at which BWMs of various amplitudes could have occurred during the time spanned by our data–e.g., BWMs with amplitudes greater than 10−13 must occur at a rate less than 1.5 yr−1. Subject headings: pulsars, gravitational waves.

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