Inference of cosmological parameters from gravitational waves: Applications to second generation interferometers

By Walter Del Pozzo. 2011

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The advanced world-wide network of gravitational waves (GW) observatories is scheduled to begin operations within the current decade. Thanks to their improved sensitivity, they promise to yield a number of detections and thus to open a new observational windows for astronomy and astrophysics. Among the scientific goals that should be achieved, there is the independent measurement of the value of the cosmological parameters, hence an independent test of the current cosmological paradigm. Due to the importance of such task, a number of studies have evaluated the capabilities of GW telescopes in this respect. However, since GW do not yield information about the source redshift, different groups have made different assumptions regarding the means through which the GW redshift can be obtained. These different assumptions imply also different methodologies to solve this inference problem. This work presents a formalism based on Bayesian inference developed to facilitate the inclusion of all assumptions and prior information about a GW source within a single data analysis framework. This approach guarantees the minimisation of information loss and the possibility of including naturally event-specific knowledge (such as the sky position for a Gamma Ray Burst - GW coincident observation) in the analysis. The workings of the method are applied to a specific example, loosely designed along the lines of the method proposed by Schutz in 1986, in which one uses information from wide-field galaxy surveys as prior information for the location of a GW source. I show that combining the results from few tens of observations from a network of advanced interferometers will constrain the Hubble constant $H_0$ to an accuracy of $\sim 4 - 5$% at 95% confidence.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8dcc1ab524733eb89f9f09918857d6c76a032841

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

GLADE: A galaxy catalogue for multimessenger searches in the advanced gravitational-wave detector era (2018, methodology): “The multi-messenger observing of GW170817 allowed its use in measuring the local expansion rate of the universe, characterised by the Hubble constant (Abbott et al. 2017d, for its theoretical background see Schutz 1986 and Del Pozzo 2012).”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, methodology): “For instance, in a modern version of a statistical method proposed already in [70], one constructs a Bayesian likelihood by assigning probabilistically a host galaxy to the GW event, within the localization volume found by the GW detectors (see [71] for a recent discussion).”
Testing modified gravity at cosmological distances with LISA standard sirens (2019, background): “Much work as been devoted in the literature to studying how standard sirens can be used for cosmology [22–34]; see in particular [35–37] for recent work specifically related to LISA.”