Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Astronomy and Space Science, Australia Telescope National Facility, Post Office Box 76, Epping, New South Wales 1710, Australia. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia 6102, Australia.
Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Post Office Box 218, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
Science. 2015 Sep 25;349(6255):1522-5. doi: 10.1126/science.aab1910.
Gravitational waves are expected to be radiated by supermassive black hole binaries formed during galaxy mergers. A stochastic superposition of gravitational waves from all such binary systems would modulate the arrival times of pulses from radio pulsars. Using observations of millisecond pulsars obtained with the Parkes radio telescope, we constrained the characteristic amplitude of this background, A(c,yr), to be <1.0 × 10(-15) with 95% confidence. This limit excludes predicted ranges for A(c,yr) from current models with 91 to 99.7% probability. We conclude that binary evolution is either stalled or dramatically accelerated by galactic-center environments and that higher-cadence and shorter-wavelength observations would be more sensitive to gravitational waves.
引力波预计将由星系合并过程中形成的超大质量黑洞双星辐射。所有此类双星系统产生的引力波的随机叠加将调制来自射电脉冲星的脉冲到达时间。利用帕克斯射电望远镜观测到的毫秒脉冲星，我们将这种背景的特征幅度 A(c，yr) 限制在 <1.0×10(-15)，置信度为 95%。该限制以 91%至 99.7%的概率排除了当前模型对 A(c，yr)的预测范围。我们得出结论，双星演化要么被星系中心环境停滞，要么被急剧加速，更高的时频和更短的波长观测将对引力波更敏感。
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