Gravitational Self-Lensing in Populations of Massive Black Hole Binaries

Understand

The community may be on the verge of detecting low-frequency gravitational waves from massive black hole binaries (MBHBs), but no examples of binary active galactic nuclei (AGN) have been confirmed.

• Because MBHBs are intrinsically rare, the most promising detection methods utilize photometric data from all-sky surveys.
• Recently D'Orazio & Di Stefano 2018 (arXiv:1707.02335) suggested gravitational self-lensing as a method of detecting AGN in close separation binaries.
• In this study we calculate the detectability of lensing signatures in realistic populations of simulated MBHBs.