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The impact of large-scale galaxy clustering on the variance of the Hellings-Downs correlation: numerical results

Published inJournal of cosmology and astroparticle physics, vol. 04, no. 04, 047
Publication date2025
First online date2025-04-16
Abstract

Pulsar timing array experiments have recently found evidence for a stochasticgravitational wave (GW) background, which induces correlations among pulsar timing residualsdescribed by the Hellings and Downs (HD) curve. Standard calculations of the HD correlation andits variance assume an isotropic background. However, for a background of astrophysical origin, weexpect a higher GW spectral density in directions with higher galaxy number densities. In acompanion paper, we have developed a theoretical formalism to account for the anisotropies arisingfrom large-scale galaxy clustering, leading to a new contribution to the variance of the HDcorrelation. In this subsequent work, we provide numerical results for this novel effect. Weconsider a GW background resulting from mergers of supermassive black hole binaries, and relatethe merger number density to the overdensity of galaxies. We find that anisotropies due tolarge-scale galaxy clustering lead to a standard deviation of the HD correlation at most atpercent level, remaining well below the standard contributions to the HD variance. Hence, thiskind of anisotropies in the GW source distribution does not represent a substantial contaminationto the correlations of timing residuals in present and future PTA surveys. Suitable statisticalmethods to extract the galaxy clustering signal from PTA data will be investigated in the future.

Keywords
  • Galaxy clustering
  • Gravitational waves / sources
  • Gravitational waves / theory
Citation (ISO format)
GRIMM-THIEME, Nastassia et al. The impact of large-scale galaxy clustering on the variance of the Hellings-Downs correlation: numerical results. In: Journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics, 2025, vol. 04, n° 04, p. 047. doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2025/04/047
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Journal ISSN1475-7516
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