A standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from GW170817 without the electromagnetic counterpart

By Maya Fishbach, R. Gray, I. Hernandez, H. Qi, A. Sur, F. Acernese, L. Aiello, A. Allocca, M. Aloy, A. Amato and 310 more. 2018

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform a statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817. Our analysis does not utilize knowledge of NGC 4993 as the unique host galaxy of the optical counterpart to GW170817. Instead, we consider each galaxy within the GW170817 localization region as a potential host; combining the redshift from each galaxy with the distance estimate from GW170817 provides an estimate of the Hubble constant, $H_0$. We then combine the $H_0$ values from all the galaxies to provide a final measurement of $H_0$. We explore the dependence of our results on the thresholds by which galaxies are included in our sample, as well as the impact of weighting the galaxies by stellar mass and star-formation rate. Considering all galaxies brighter than $0.01 L^\star_B$ as equally likely to host a BNS merger, we find $H_0= 76^{+48}_{-23}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ (maximum a posteriori and 68.3% highest density posterior interval; assuming a flat $H_0$ prior in the range $\left[ 10, 220 \right]$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$). Restricting only to galaxies brighter than $0.626 L^\star_B$ tightens the measurement to $H_0= 77^{+37}_{-18}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$. We show that weighting the host galaxies by stellar mass or star-formation rate provides entirely consistent results with potentially tighter constraints. While these statistical estimates are inferior to the value from the counterpart standard siren measurement utilizing NGC 4993 as the unique host, $H_0=76^{+19}_{-13}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ (determined from the same publicly available data), our analysis is a proof-of-principle demonstration of the statistical approach first proposed by Bernard Schutz over 30 years ago.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e045e8eba358ea48fe99c57e734acbee9827867f

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Citations in the corpus

Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, methodology): “One could also use the statistical method to obtain H0 without information of the counterpart, although the error is significantly larger H0 = 76+48 −23km s−1Mpc−1 (Fishbach et al., 2018).”
Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “For these sources thus one can only construct posterior distribution in the distance-redshift diagram, describing the probability of the redshift associated with the GW event based on the distribution of galaxies within the GW localization volume, as first demonstrated by GW170817 [103] and GW170814”
Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion History from GWTC–3 (2021, background): “…redshift information from galaxy catalogs (Schutz 1986; MacLeod & Hogan 2008; Del Pozzo 2012; Nishizawa 2017; Chen et al. 2018; Nair et al. 2018; Fishbach et al. 2019; Soares-Santos et al. 2019; Gray et al. 2020; Yu et al. 2020; Palmese et al. 2020; Borhanian et al. 2020; Finke et al. 2021),…”