Cosmology with LIGO/Virgo dark sirens: Hubble parameter and modified gravitational wave propagation

2021/01/29 by Andreas Finke, Stefano Foffa, Francesco Iacovelli +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Binary black hole #Cosmology #Dark energy #Dark matter #Dark radiation #Galaxy #Gravitational wave #Hubble's law #LIGO #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2021/08/026

v2: several significant technical improvements, results changed v3: minor changes, Fig 9 added. The version to appear in JCAP

openalex publication_date 2021/01/29 · arxiv created 2021/07/16 · arxiv updated 2021/08/25 · openalex created_date 2021/08/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

We present a detailed study of the methodology for correlating `dark sirens' (compact binaries coalescences without electromagnetic counterpart) with galaxy catalogs. We propose several improvements on the current state of the art, and we apply them to the GWTC-2 catalog of LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave (GW) detections, and the GLADE galaxy catalog, performing a detailed study of several sources of systematic errors that, with the expected increase in statistics, will eventually become the dominant limitation. We provide a measurement of H₀ from dark sirens alone, finding as the best result H₀=67.3^+27.6_-17.9 \rm km \rm s^-1 \rm Mpc^-1 (68% c.l.) which is, currently, the most stringent constraint obtained using only dark sirens. Combining dark sirens with the counterpart for GW170817 we find H₀= 72.2^+13.9_-7.5 \rm km \rm s^-1 \rm Mpc^-1. We also study modified GW propagation, which is a smoking gun of dark energy and modifications of gravity at cosmological scales, and we show that current observations of dark sirens already start to provide interesting limits. From dark sirens alone, our best result for the parameter Ξ₀ that measures deviations from GR (with Ξ₀=1 in GR) is Ξ₀=2.1^+3.2_-1.2. We finally discuss limits on modified GW propagation under the tentative identification of the flare ZTF19abanrhr as the electromagnetic counterpart of the binary black hole coalescence GW190521, in which case our most stringent result is Ξ₀=1.8^+0.9_-0.6. We release the publicly available code \ttDarkSirensStat, which is available under open source license at \urlhttps://github.com/CosmoStatGW/DarkSirensStat.

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• Cosmology with the angular cross-correlation of gravitational-wave and galaxy catalogs: forecasts for next-generation interferometers and the Euclid survey