How will we find the galaxies hosting black hole mergers detected by pulsars?

Researchers simulated what happens when pulsar timing arrays detect individual supermassive black hole binaries in the next decade. The gravitational wave signal narrows the search to an area the size of hundreds of square degrees, containing ~190,000 candidate galaxies. A ranking system using black hole masses and redshifts can eliminate half the false candidates, raising the odds of correct identification from <1% to ~14% by 2035.