Astro Seminar: Bence Becsy

Date and Time: 08.09.2025 at 2:15 PM

Speaker: Bence Bécsy (UoB)

Place: Auditorium A

Title: “From Background to Foreground: Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Pulsar Timing Arrays”

Abstract:

Pulsar timing arrays recently uncovered compelling evidence for a stochastic gravitational-wave background by measuring small changes in the times-of-arrival of radio pulses from millisecond pulsars. The most likely source of such a background is a population of supermassive black hole binaries, however, more exotic sources from the early universe are also consistent with the data. If the background is indeed coming from black hole binaries, we will soon be able to resolve the loudest individual systems. Even a single such detection would confirm the source of the background and provide a direct way to probe the formation and growth of the largest black holes in the universe. I will talk about the challenges of finding these binaries, how we can confidently distinguish them from spurious signals, and what we can potentially learn about their population and evolution by doing so.