The Abundance of X-Shaped Radio Sources: Implications for the
  Gravitational Wave Background
  Coalescence of super massive black holes (SMBH's) in galaxy mergers is
potentially the dominant contributor to the low frequency gravitational wave
background (GWB). IIt was proposed by Merritt and Ekers (2002) that X-shaped
radio galaxies are signposts of such coalescences, and that their abundance
might be used to predict the magnitude of the gravitational wave background. In
Roberts et al. (2015) we present radio images of all 52 X-shaped radio source
candidates out of the sample of 100 selected by Cheung (2007) for which
archival VLA data were available. These images indicate that at most 21% of the
candidates might be genuine X-shaped radio sources that were formed by a
restarting of beams in a new direction following a major merger. This suggests
that fewer than 1.3% of extended radio sources appear to be candidates for
genuine axis reorientations ("spin flips"), much smaller than the 7% suggested
by Leahy and Parma (1992). Thus the associated gravitational wave background
may be substantially smaller than previous estimates. These results can be used
to normalize detailed calculations of the SMBH coalescence rate and the GWB.
