Using Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens

By D. Holz, S. Hughes. 2005

577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravitational waves (GWs) from supermassive binary black hole (BBH) in-spirals are potentially powerful standard sirens (the GW analog to standard candles; see work of B. Schutz). Because these systems are well modeled, the space-based GW observatory LISA will be able to measure the luminosity distance (but not the redshift) to some distant massive BBH systems with 1%-10% accuracy. This accuracy is largely limited by pointing error: GW sources are generally poorly localized on the sky. Localizing the binary independently (e.g., through association with an electromagnetic counterpart) greatly reduces this positional error. An electromagnetic counterpart may also allow determination of the event's redshift. In this case, BBH coalescence would constitute an extremely precise (better than 1%) standard candle visible to high redshift. In practice, gravitational lensing degrades this precision, although the candle remains precise enough to provide useful information about the distance-redshift relation. Even if very rare, these GW standard sirens would complement, and increase confidence in, other standard candles.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b08fedcf0a3e39558a85659d21c4d52e9c9fcc37

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Metzger
2. E. Berger
3. D. Kasen
4. Michela Mapelli
5. E. Quataert
6. P. Hopkins
7. L. Hernquist
8. D. Holz

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. B. Metzger
2. D. Kasen
3. E. Berger
4. G. Mart'inez-Pinedo
5. J. Barnes
6. Michela Mapelli
7. Yi Wang
8. E. Quataert

Citations in the corpus

• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. I. Discovery of the Optical Counterpart Using the Dark Energy Camera (2017, background): “These multimessenger observations also allow for novel measurements, such as standard siren measurements of the Hubble constant (Schutz 1986; Holz & Hughes 2005; Dalal et al. 2006; Nissanke et al. 2010, 2013), and studies of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs; Berger 2014).”
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, background): “Second, we add to this “experimental” error those due to weak-lensing and peculiar velocities, σlens(z) and σv(z) [19, 43].”
• An Eccentric Circumbinary Accretion Disk and the Detection of Binary Massive Black Holes (2006, methodology): “…wave observations of coalescing massive black holes with theLaser Interferometer Space Antenna(LISA).7 Simultaneous electromagnetic and gravitational detection can be used to measure the geometry of the universe and constrain properties of dark energy (e.g., Holz & Hughes 2005; Kocsis et al. 2006).”
• LISA technology and instrumentation (2009, background): “the coalescence of massive black holes even at redshifts of z = 20 with a signal-to-noise-ratio of several hundreds [17, 23, 24].”
• Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “…by LISA (Lang and Hughes, 2009), would provide an independent calibration of the distance scale and a precise probe of cosmology including the nature of the mysterious dark energy (Arun et al., 2009b; Dalal et al., 2006; Holz and Hughes, 2005; Jonsson et al., 2007; Kocsis et al., 2006, 2008, 2007).”
• Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate (2020, methodology): “The existence of a gap in the mass distribution can also be used as a “standardizable siren” for cosmology and used to place constraints on the Hubble constant (Schutz 1986; Holz & Hughes 2005; Farr et al. 2019).”
• The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream (2007, unknown): “LISA sources could then be used as “standard sirens” (Schutz 1986) to estimate fundamental cosmological parameters (Schutz 2002; Holz & Hughes 2005), providing constraints complementary to cosmic microwave background experiments, and supernovae search experiments.”
• Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “SMBHsmight be good standard sirens for LISA as well (Holz and Hughes, 2005).”
• Light curves of the neutron star merger GW170817/SSS17a: Implications for r-process nucleosynthesis (2017, methodology): “In this manuscript, we supplement our existing light curves and SEDs with measurements from synthetic photometry under the following conditions: (1) they add to a band in which we had existing observations, (2) they were obtained from a high S/N spectrum, (3) the entire filter response function fall”
• Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “If the source is at a redshift larger than one, as we can expect for LISA, then random microlensing can produce a magnification or demagnification on the order of a few percent [195, 131].”