Toward the Unambiguous Identification of Supermassive Binary Black Holes through Bayesian Inference

Abstract

Supermassive binary black holes at subparsec orbital separations have yet to be discovered, with the possible exception of blazar OJ 287. In parallel to the global hunt for nanohertz gravitational waves from supermassive binaries using pulsar timing arrays, there has been a growing sample of candidates reported from electromagnetic surveys, particularly searches for periodic variations in the optical light curves of quasars. However, the periodicity search is prone to false positives from quasar red noise and quasiperiodic oscillations from the accretion disk of a single supermassive black hole, especially when the data span fewer than a few signal cycles. We present a Bayesian method for the detection of quasar (quasi)periodicity in the presence of red noise. We apply this method to the binary candidate PG 1302−102 and show that (a) there is very strong support (Bayes factor >10 6 ) for quasiperiodicity and (b) the data slightly favor a quasiperiodic oscillation over a sinusoidal signal, which we interpret as modest evidence against the binary black hole hypothesis. We also find that the prevalent damped random walk red-noise model is disfavored with more than 99.9% credibility. Finally, we outline future work that may enable the unambiguous identification of supermassive binary black holes.