2011/02/03 by Antoine Petiteau, Stanislav Babak, Alberto Sesana · 63 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black hole (networking) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark energy #Equation of state #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gravitational wave #LIGO #Luminosity distance #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Redshift #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/732/2/82
published in The Astrophysical Journal 732(2), 82 (IOP Publishing) · 12 pages, 8 figures, revised version to address referee's comments, submitted to ApJ
arxiv created 2011/02/03 · openalex publication_date 2011/04/20 · arxiv updated 2015/03/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Gravitational wave (GW) signals from coalescing massive black hole (MBH) binaries could be used as standard sirens to measure cosmological parameters. The future space-based GW observatory Laser Interferometer Space Antenna ( LISA ) will detect up to a hundred of those events, providing very accurate measurements of their luminosity distances. To constrain the cosmological parameters, we also need to measure the redshift of the galaxy (or cluster of galaxies) hosting the merger. This requires the identification of a distinctive electromagnetic event associated with the binary coalescence. However, putative electromagnetic signatures may be too weak to be observed. Instead, we study here the possibility of constraining the cosmological parameters by enforcing statistical consistency between all the possible hosts detected within the measurement error box of a few dozen of low-redshift ( z < 3) events. We construct MBH populations using merger tree realizations of the dark matter hierarchy in a ΛCDM universe, and we use data from the Millennium simulation to model the galaxy distribution in the LISA error box. We show that, assuming that all the other cosmological parameters are known, the parameter w describing the dark energy equation of state can be constrained to a 4%–8% level (2σ error), competitive with current uncertainties obtained by type Ia supernovae measurements, providing an independent test of our cosmological model.