EXPLORING SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURSTS AS GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE STANDARD SIRENS

By S. Nissanke, D. Holz, S. Hughes, N. Dalal, Jonathan Sievers. 2009

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations support the hypothesis that a large fraction of “short-hard” gamma-ray bursts (SHBs) are associated with the inspiral and merger of compact binaries. Since gravitational-wave (GW) measurements of well-localized inspiraling binaries can measure absolute source distances, simultaneous observation of a binary's GWs and SHB would allow us to directly and independently determine both the binary's luminosity distance and its redshift. Such a “standard siren” (the GW analog of a standard candle) would provide an excellent probe of the nearby (z ≲ 0.3) universe's expansion, independent of the cosmological distance ladder, thereby complementing other standard candles. Previous work explored this idea using a simplified formalism to study measurement by advanced GW detector networks, incorporating a high signal-to-noise ratio limit to describe the probability distribution for measured parameters. In this paper, we eliminate this simplification, constructing distributions with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique. We assume that each SHB observation gives source sky position and time of coalescence, and we take non-spinning binary neutron star and black hole–neutron star coalescences as plausible SHB progenitors. We examine how well parameters (particularly distance) can be measured from GW observations of SHBs by a range of ground-based detector networks. We find that earlier estimates overstate how well distances can be measured, even at fairly large signal-to-noise ratio. The fundamental limitation to determining distance proves to be a degeneracy between distance and source inclination. Overcoming this limitation requires that we either break this degeneracy, or measure enough sources to broadly sample the inclination distribution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87044e38570c74d62938e5e5419158bb1b25f189

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The THESEUS space mission concept: science case, design and expected performances (2017, background): “With 10 GW+EM events, the Hubble constant could be constrained to 2-3%, thus providing a precise independent measure of this fundamental parameter (Dalal et al., 2006; Nissanke et al., 2010).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “Nissanke et al. (2010) forecast constraints on H0 from next-generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors, including Monte Carlo simulations of parameter recovery from neutron starneutron star and neutron star-black hole mergers.”
The third generation of gravitational wave observatories and their science reach (2010, background): “The low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of such events might not permit detailed measurement of the physical properties of the sources but advanced detectors could begin to impact cosmography by independently measuring the Hubble constant to a few percent [19].”
Binary Black Hole Mergers in the First Advanced LIGO Observing Run (2016, background): “This is predominantly a consequence of the degeneracy between the distance and the binary’s inclination, which also impacts the signal amplitude [95,119,120].”
GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “The significant uncertainty in the luminosity distance stems from the degeneracy between the distance and the binary’s inclination, inferred from the signal amplitude [122, 174, 175].”
Constraining the Maximum Mass of Neutron Stars from Multi-messenger Observations of GW170817 (2017, background): “…objectives requiring a large population of GW detections, such as “standard siren” measurements of the cosmic expansion history (Holz & Hughes 2005; Nissanke et al. 2010; LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al. 2017c) or as probes of the equation of state (EOS) of NSs (e.g. Read et al. 2009;…”
WHAT IS THE MOST PROMISING ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERPART OF A NEUTRON STAR BINARY MERGER? (2011, background): “In principle the number of candidate galaxies could be reduced if the distance can be constrained from the GW signal; however, distance estimates for individual events are rather uncertain, especially at that low SNRs that will characterize most detections (Nissanke et al. 2010).”
Compact binary coalescences in the band of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors (2009, background): “We refer the reader to [72, 84] and references therein for detailed discussions of the scientific promise of multi-messenger astronomy, which spans the range from exposing GRB progenitors to enabling precise cosmography [59].”
Properties of the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817 (2018, background): “[106,107], when only measuring one polarization of GW radiation from a binary merger, in the absence of strong precession there is a degeneracy between distance and inclination of the binary.”