Moore Christopher J, Mihaylov Deyan P, Lasenby Anthony, Gilmore Gerard
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom.
Intitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, United Kingdom.
Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Dec 29;119(26):261102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.261102.
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.
引力波（GWs）会使遥远恒星的视位置在天空中以一种特征模式振荡。天体测量（例如盖亚所进行的测量）为搜寻引力波提供了一种新方法。此类搜寻面临的主要困难在于数据集规模巨大；盖亚观测了超过十亿颗恒星。在本快报中，首次探讨了利用天体测量从可单独分辨的超大质量黑洞双星中搜寻引力波的问题；展示了如何将数据集压缩超过10⁶倍，同时灵敏度损失小于1%。该技术已成功用于从模拟盖亚数据中恢复人工注入的引力波信号，并评估盖亚对引力波的灵敏度。在本快报中，始终强调了盖亚和脉冲星计时搜寻引力波的互补性。
