A Statistical Standard Siren Measurement of the Hubble Constant from the LIGO/Virgo Gravitational Wave Compact Object Merger GW190814 and Dark Energy Survey Galaxies

Abstract

We present a measurement of the Hubble constant H 0 using the gravitational wave (GW) event GW190814, which resulted from the coalescence of a 23 M ⊙ black hole with a 2.6 M ⊙ compact object, as a standard siren. No compelling electromagnetic counterpart has been identified for this event; thus our analysis accounts for thousands of potential host galaxies within a statistical framework. The redshift information is obtained from the photometric redshift (photo-z) catalog from the Dark Energy Survey. The luminosity distance is provided by the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave sky map. Since this GW event has the second-smallest localization volume after GW170817, GW190814 is likely to provide the best constraint on cosmology from a single standard siren without identifying an electromagnetic counterpart. Our analysis uses photo-z probability distribution functions and corrects for photo-z biases. We also reanalyze the binary black hole GW170814 within this updated framework. We explore how our findings impact the H 0 constraints from GW170817, the only GW merger associated with a unique host galaxy. From a combination of GW190814, GW170814, and GW170817, our analysis yields (68% highest-density interval, HDI) for a prior in H 0 uniform between . The addition of GW190814 and GW170814 to GW170817 improves the 68% HDI from GW170817 alone by ∼18%, showing how well-localized mergers without counterparts can provide a significant contribution to standard siren measurements, provided that a complete galaxy catalog is available at the location of the event.

Joint constraints on the field-cluster mixing fraction, common envelope efficiency, and globular cluster radii from a population of binary hole mergers via deep learning

“…The number of GW events in this new catalogue (50) is ∼4 times the number of events from the first two observational runs combined [3], allowing for the increasingly sensitive exploration of their mass, spin and merger redshift distributions [4]. As the statistical uncertainties in these distributions continue to drop with the growing number of detections, the population of GW events provides a unique, and increasingly powerful, avenue to probe a wide range of topics, including fundamental physics [5], cosmology [6,7], and astrophysics [8][9][10].…”

Biases in parameter estimation from overlapping gravitational-wave signals in the third-generation detector era

“…The direct observation of gravitational waves (GWs) [1] has had a tremendous impact in fundamental physics [2][3][4][5], astrophysics [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], and cosmology [16][17][18], and starting from the observation of the binary neutron star (BNS) signal GW170817 [9] has opened a new era in multi-messenger astronomy with GWs [19][20][21][22]. The third observing run (O3) of Advanced LIGO [23] and Advanced Virgo [24] ended in March 2020, and together these interferometers have found more than 50 GW candidates [25], with 39 candidates observed during the first half of O3 [8].…”

A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant

“…The posteriors of Planck (Planck Collaboration 2020) and SH0ES (Riess et al 2019) are shown in purple boxes as a guide. Image reproduced with permission from Palmese et al (2020), copyright by AAS position (Soares-Santos et al 2019). For example, if 3 detectors observe the wave with perfect accuracy, the two independent time delays and three measured amplitudes will in turn determine the two sky position angles, two polarisation amplitudes, and one phase lag between polarisations.…”