The Era of Binary Supermassive Black Holes: Coordination of Nanohertz-Frequency Gravitational-Wave Follow-up

Organizers:

*Sarah Burke-Spolaor, West Virginia University
Jeffrey Hazboun, Oregon State University
Chiara Mingarelli, Yale University
Kayhan Gültekin, University of Michigan

*organizer responsible for participant diversity

This Aspen conference will mark the notable recent demonstration of evidence for a gravitational-wave background of binary supermassive black holes published by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). Based on cosmological simulations, binary supermassive black holes are predicted to be the dominant source of low-frequency gravitational-waves, both as individual sources and as a gravitational-wave background. In 2023, international PTA teams announced their findings of evidence for the gravitational-wave background. There are significant prospects for finding “continuous wave” emission from individual foreground binaries in the coming years. These will represent the very first conclusive, direct detections of these gargantuan binary systems. As we enter this significant era of first discovery, coordination is crucial: rich science will come from the identification of host galaxies of continuous-wave detections. This pursuit will necessarily involve a broad-strokes multi-wavelength effort, coordinated between PTAs, astronomical archives, new wide-field surveys, and new targeted observations. In this era of imminent continuous-wave detections by PTAs, it will be important to provide a roadmap towards observational coordination between these efforts. This workshop will draw a broad range of electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observers, large-survey scientists, and astronomy cyberinfrastructure scientists, to plan and coordinate such follow-up. We anticipate that this Aspen meeting will facilitate new collaborations and lead to significantly accelerated progress in this field.

Learn more on the conference website here: https://gwac.wvu.edu/aspen-physics-conference