Measuring the Hubble constant with black sirens

Abstract

We investigate a recently proposed method for measuring the Hubble constant from gravitational wave detections of binary black hole coalescences without electromagnetic counterparts. In the absence of a direct redshift measurement, the missing information on the left-hand side of the Hubble-Lemaître law is provided by the statistical knowledge on the redshift distribution of sources. We assume that source distribution in redshift depends on just one unknown hyper-parameter, modeling our ignorance of the astrophysical binary black hole distribution. With tens of thousands of these "black sirens" -a realistic figure for the third generation detectors Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Exploreran observational constraint on the value of the Hubble parameter at percent level can be obtained. This method has the advantage of not relying on electromagnetic counterparts, which accompany a very small fraction of gravitational wave detections, nor on often unavailable or incomplete galaxy catalogs.

Unveiling the Universe with emerging cosmological probes

“…Another extension of the statistical dark standard siren method is to use prior knowledge of the merger redshift distribution, derived from external measurements of the star formation rate and time delay distribution of binary mergers, to compare against the observed gravitational-wave distance distribution (Ding et al 2019;Ye and Fishbach 2021;Leandro et al 2021). Finally, a particularly promising avenue for gravitational-wave only standard siren analyses is to use known features in the source population to directly extract the redshift and distance from the gravitational-wave signal alone.…”

Premerger localization of Intermediate Mass Binary Black Holes with LISA and prospects of joint observations with Athena and LSST

“…Even in the absence of an EM counterpart detection, very precise localization can facilitate host galaxy identification using galaxy catalogs [110][111][112][113][114]. Based on the luminosity distance and sky-position errors discussed earlier, if an independent estimate of redshift is available from either the galaxy surveys or EM counterparts, the Hubble-Lemaître constant can be estimated to 10% accuracy for a subset of the systems we consider here [115,116]. Indeed, by the time LISA has launched the advanced ground-based detectors such as Voyager [117] or third-generation GW detectors such as Einstein Telescope [93] or Cosmic Explorer [92] may have achieved this level of accuracy [118].…”

A model-independent tripartite test of cosmic distance relations

“…A number of other uses of GWs for cosmology without electromagnetic counterpart have been proposed, such as: through the assumption of understood features in the mass distribution of binary black holes (BBH) such as a characteristic mass scale or a mass-gap [8][9][10][11][12]; through measurements of tidal deformation in the waveform [13]; or through priors on the redshift distribution of sources [14]. In another approach, the use of bright siren clustering as probes of the density and peculiar velocity fields have also been recently shown to be a very promising avenue [15][16][17].…”