A Standard Siren Measurement of the Hubble Constant from GW170817 without the Electromagnetic Counterpart

Abstract

We perform a statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817. Our analysis does not utilize knowledge of NGC 4993 as the unique host galaxy of the optical counterpart to GW170817. Instead, we consider each galaxy within the GW170817 localization region as a potential host; combining the redshifts from all of the galaxies with the distance estimate from GW170817 provides an estimate of the Hubble constant, H 0. Considering all galaxies brighter than as equally likely to host a binary neutron star merger, we find km s−1 Mpc−1 (maximum a posteriori and 68.3% highest density posterior interval; assuming a flat H 0 prior in the range km s−1 Mpc−1). We explore the dependence of our results on the thresholds by which galaxies are included in our sample, and we show that weighting the host galaxies by stellar mass or star formation rate provides entirely consistent results with potentially tighter constraints. By applying the method to simulated gravitational-wave events and a realistic galaxy catalog we show that, because of the small localization volume, this statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817 provides an unusually informative (top 10%) constraint. Under optimistic assumptions for galaxy completeness and redshift uncertainty, we find that dark binary neutron star measurements of H 0 will converge as , where N is the number of sources. While these statistical estimates are inferior to the value from the counterpart standard siren measurement utilizing NGC 4993 as the unique host, km s−1 Mpc−1 (determined from the same publicly available data), our analysis is a proof-of-principle demonstration of the statistical approach first proposed by Bernard Schutz over 30 yr ago.

First Measurement of the Hubble Constant from a Dark Standard Siren using the Dark Energy Survey Galaxies and the LIGO/Virgo Binary–Black-hole Merger GW170814

“…Provided a catalog of potential host galaxies within the event localization region, their redshifts will contribute in a probabilistic way to the measurement of H 0 , depending on the galaxies' distance and sky position. This approach has been developed within a Bayesian framework by Del Pozzo (2012) and Chen et al (2018) and implemented in Fishbach et al (2019) using GW170817, which produced results consistent with the first measurement (Abbott et al 2017a) where the identified host galaxy, NGC 4993 (e.g., Palmese et al 2017), was used. Eventually, a large sample of events will enable precise cosmological measurements using the dark siren approach.…”

Merging Rates of Compact Binaries in Galaxies: Perspectives for Gravitational Wave Detections

“…On the one hand, the analysis of the individual GW signal waveforms can provide useful information about the properties and evolution of the progenitor binary systems (remnant masses, spins, orbital parameters; e.g., Weinstein 2012; Abbott et al 2016a,b,c). On the other hand, the statistics of GW events can yield astrophysical constraints on stellar binary evolution (SN kicks, common envelope effects, mass transfers; e.g., Belczynski et al 2016;Dvorkin et al 2018;Mapelli & Giocobbo 2018), on the average properties of the host galaxies (chemical evolution, star formation histories, initial mass function; e.g., O'Shaughnessy et al 2010;de Mink & Belczynski 2015;Vitale & Farr 2018), and even on cosmology at large (e.g., Nissanke et al 2013;Liao et al 2017;Fishbach et al 2019).…”

Unbiased Hubble constant estimation from binary neutron star mergers

“…• Binary neutron star (BNS) mergers are particularly promising, as a possible electromagnetic (EM) counterpart could be used to identify a host galaxy from which a spectroscopic redshift measurement could be made (e.g., [43][44][45]). For some fraction of BNS mergers a counterpart will not be identified, in which case it is plausible to take a statistical approach, averaging over the host galaxies that are consistent with the GW localization [46][47][48]. It is also possible that GW data alone could be used to obtain redshift constraints by exploiting either the narrowness of the NS mass distribution [49] or NS tidal deformability [50].…”