Prospects for EMRI/MBH parameter estimation using Quasi-Periodic Eruption timings: short-timescale analysis
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915467619205120 |
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| author | Chakraborty, Joheen Drummond, Lisa V. Bonetti, Matteo Franchini, Alessia Kejriwal, Shubham Miniutti, Giovanni Arcodia, Riccardo Hughes, Scott A. Duque, Francisco Kara, Erin Sesana, Alberto Giustini, Margherita Motta, Amedeo Burdge, Kevin |
| author_facet | Chakraborty, Joheen Drummond, Lisa V. Bonetti, Matteo Franchini, Alessia Kejriwal, Shubham Miniutti, Giovanni Arcodia, Riccardo Hughes, Scott A. Duque, Francisco Kara, Erin Sesana, Alberto Giustini, Margherita Motta, Amedeo Burdge, Kevin |
| contents | Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs) are luminous, recurring X-ray outbursts from galactic nuclei, with timescales of hours to days. While their origin remains uncertain, leading models invoke accretion disk instabilities or the interaction of a massive black hole (MBH) with a lower-mass secondary in an extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI). EMRI scenarios offer a robust framework for interpreting QPEs by characterizing observational signatures associated with the secondary's orbital dynamics. This, in turn, enables extraction of the MBH/EMRI physical properties and provides a means to test the EMRI scenario, distinguishing models and addressing the question: what can QPE timings teach us about massive black holes and EMRIs? In this study, we employ analytic expressions for Kerr geodesics to efficiently resolve the trajectory of the secondary object and perform GPU-accelerated Bayesian inference to assess the information content of QPE timings. Using our inference framework, referred to as QPE-FIT (Fast Inference with Timing), we explore QPE timing constraints on astrophysical parameters, such as EMRI orbital parameters and MBH mass/spin. We find that mild-eccentricity EMRIs ($e\sim0.1-0.3$) can constrain MBH mass and EMRI semimajor axis/eccentricity to the 10% level within tens of orbital periods, while MBH spin is unconstrained for the explored semimajor axes $\geq 100R_g$ and monitoring baselines $\mathcal{O}(10-100\rm)$ orbits. Introducing a misaligned precessing disk generally degrades inference of EMRI orbital parameters, but can constrain disk precession properties within 10-50%. This work both highlights the prospect of QPE observations as dynamical probes of galactic nuclei and outlines the challenge of doing so in the multimodal parameter space of EMRI-disk collisions. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20162 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Prospects for EMRI/MBH parameter estimation using Quasi-Periodic Eruption timings: short-timescale analysis Chakraborty, Joheen Drummond, Lisa V. Bonetti, Matteo Franchini, Alessia Kejriwal, Shubham Miniutti, Giovanni Arcodia, Riccardo Hughes, Scott A. Duque, Francisco Kara, Erin Sesana, Alberto Giustini, Margherita Motta, Amedeo Burdge, Kevin High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs) are luminous, recurring X-ray outbursts from galactic nuclei, with timescales of hours to days. While their origin remains uncertain, leading models invoke accretion disk instabilities or the interaction of a massive black hole (MBH) with a lower-mass secondary in an extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI). EMRI scenarios offer a robust framework for interpreting QPEs by characterizing observational signatures associated with the secondary's orbital dynamics. This, in turn, enables extraction of the MBH/EMRI physical properties and provides a means to test the EMRI scenario, distinguishing models and addressing the question: what can QPE timings teach us about massive black holes and EMRIs? In this study, we employ analytic expressions for Kerr geodesics to efficiently resolve the trajectory of the secondary object and perform GPU-accelerated Bayesian inference to assess the information content of QPE timings. Using our inference framework, referred to as QPE-FIT (Fast Inference with Timing), we explore QPE timing constraints on astrophysical parameters, such as EMRI orbital parameters and MBH mass/spin. We find that mild-eccentricity EMRIs ($e\sim0.1-0.3$) can constrain MBH mass and EMRI semimajor axis/eccentricity to the 10% level within tens of orbital periods, while MBH spin is unconstrained for the explored semimajor axes $\geq 100R_g$ and monitoring baselines $\mathcal{O}(10-100\rm)$ orbits. Introducing a misaligned precessing disk generally degrades inference of EMRI orbital parameters, but can constrain disk precession properties within 10-50%. This work both highlights the prospect of QPE observations as dynamical probes of galactic nuclei and outlines the challenge of doing so in the multimodal parameter space of EMRI-disk collisions. |
| title | Prospects for EMRI/MBH parameter estimation using Quasi-Periodic Eruption timings: short-timescale analysis |
| topic | High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20162 |