Precision of Hubble constant derived using black hole binary absolute distances and statistical redshift information

By C. MacLeod, C. Hogan. 2007

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Measured gravitational waveforms from black hole binary inspiral events directly determine absolute luminosity distances. To use these data for cosmology, it is necessary to independently obtain redshifts for the events, which may be difficult for those without electromagnetic counterparts. Here it is demonstrated that certainly in principle, and possibly in practice, clustering of galaxies allows extraction of the redshift information from a sample statistically for the purpose of estimating mean cosmological parameters, without identification of host galaxies for individual events. We extract mock galaxy samples from the 6th data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey resembling those that would be associated with inspiral events of stellar mass black holes falling into massive black holes at redshift z{approx_equal}0.1 to 0.5. A simple statistical procedure is described to estimate a likelihood function for the Hubble constant H{sub 0}: each galaxy in a LISA error volume contributes linearly to the log likelihood for the source redshift, and the log likelihood for each source contributes linearly to that of H{sub 0}. This procedure is shown to provide an accurate and unbiased estimator of H{sub 0}. It is estimated that a precision better than 1% in H{sub 0} may be possible if the ratemore » of such events is sufficiently high, on the order of 20 to z=0.5.« less

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6e0a4e35e5f46598b90a7615c37b6087ca6add7

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Citations in the corpus

Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, methodology): “It has been pointed out that a well-identified electromagnetic counterpart may not be necessary to measure the cosmological parameters with eLISA: a statistical method for the identification of a source’s redshift can be used, as described in [99, 102, 103].”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “One can also make identifications statistically using large scale structure (MacLeod and Hogan, 2008).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “Nearby coalescences and IMRIs should provide an accurate determination of the Hubble Constant [204, 250].”
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.”
Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “In that case, one expects a large rate of hyperbolic encounters [108] as well as multiple EMRIs and IMRIs, at high redshifts, which are primary targets of the sub milli-Hz frequency band probed by µAres (see IMRI tracks in Figure 1).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, methodology): “In the local Universe, the same technique applied to EMRI will allow precision measurement of H0 (MacLeod and Hogan, 2008) at a level of a few percent.”