Pulsar timing of a millisecond pulsar around a binary black hole

Yuan, Yefei

The merging binary black holes (BBHs) have been detected by the ground gravitational-wave observatories, but it is very difficult to detect BBHs before their mergers. Since millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are remarkable precise ‘clocks’ in our Universe, they could be used to detect the hidden BBHs, if they exist in systems of BBHs. In this paper, we study the time residuals of the MSP in such triple system, as expected, it is found that the amplitude of the time residual sensitively depends on the orbital parameters of the inner BBH. Thus, in principle, we can use FFT frequencies of the time residuals to determine the parameters of the inner BBHs.