H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes

By Kenneth C. Wong, Sherry H. Suyu, G. Chen, C. Rusu, M. Millon, Dominique Sluse, Vivien Bonvin, C. Fassnacht, Stefan Taubenberger, M. Auger and 16 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019

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We present a measurement of the Hubble constant (H0) and other cosmological parameters from a joint analysis of six gravitationally lensed quasars with measured time delays. All lenses except the first are analysed blindly with respect to the cosmological parameters. In a flat Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology, we find $H_{0} = 73.3_{-1.8}^{+1.7}~\mathrm{km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$, a $2.4{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ precision measurement, in agreement with local measurements of H0 from type Ia supernovae calibrated by the distance ladder, but in 3.1σ tension with Planck observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This method is completely independent of both the supernovae and CMB analyses. A combination of time-delay cosmography and the distance ladder results is in 5.3σ tension with Planck CMB determinations of H0 in flat ΛCDM. We compute Bayes factors to verify that all lenses give statistically consistent results, showing that we are not underestimating our uncertainties and are able to control our systematics. We explore extensions to flat ΛCDM using constraints from time-delay cosmography alone, as well as combinations with other cosmological probes, including CMB observations from Planck, baryon acoustic oscillations, and type Ia supernovae. Time-delay cosmography improves the precision of the other probes, demonstrating the strong complementarity. Allowing for spatial curvature does not resolve the tension with Planck. Using the distance constraints from time-delay cosmography to anchor the type Ia supernova distance scale, we reduce the sensitivity of our H0 inference to cosmological model assumptions. For six different cosmological models, our combined inference on H0 ranges from ∼73 to 78 km s−1 Mpc−1, which is consistent with the local distance ladder constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85b8771768b55871e3e7d0d327097ccb02e83349

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Citations in the corpus

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 maps and cosmological parameters (2020, neutral): “…from distances calibrated using Cepheid variable stars (Riess et al. 2019), or by using time delays from the H0LiCOW strong gravitational lenses (Wong et al. 2019, but see recent updates from Birrer et al. 2020 which give diﬀer-ent results), is signiﬁcantly higher than that estimated from…”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, methodology): “This would allow us to arbitrate the current discrepancy between the value of the Hubble parameter H0 obtained from late-Universe probes [190, 191], and the value inferred from early-Universe probes [192, 193], which has currently reached the 5.”
Resolving the Hubble tension with new early dark energy (2020, neutral): “The H0LiCoW experiment, which uses strong-lensing time delays, finds [5] H0 = 73.”
STRIDES: a 3.9 per cent measurement of the Hubble constant from the strong lens system DES J0408−5354 (2019, methodology): “…these improvements, the H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring (H0LiCOW) collaboration measure H0 = 73.3+1.7−1.8 km s -1 Mpc-1 using six lens systems (Suyu et al. 2010, 2013, 2014;Wong et al. 2017; Bonvin et al. 2017; Birrer et al. 2019; Rusu et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2019; Wong et al. 2019).”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, methodology): “The time delay distance D∆t inferred from ∆τobs is actually a combination of angular diameter distances: [37]”