Detecting the Orbital Motion of Nearby Supermassive Black Hole Binaries with Gaia
Abstract
We show that a 10 year Gaia mission could astrometrically detect the orbital motion of ~1 sub-parsec separation supermassive black hole binary in the heart of nearby, bright active galactic nuclei (AGN). Candidate AGN lie out to a redshift of z=0.02 and in the V-band magnitude range 10 mV 13. The distribution of detectable binary masses peaks at a few times 107 solar masses and is truncated above a few times 108 solar masses.
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