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arXiv · 1908.06050

Cosmological Inference using Gravitational Wave Standard Sirens: A Mock Data Challenge

Rachel Gray·Ignacio Magaña Hernandez·Hong Qi·Ankan Sur·Patrick R. Brady·Hsin-Yu Chen·Will M. Farr·Maya Fishbach·Jonathan R. Gair·Archisman Ghosh·Daniel E. Holz·Simone Mastrogiovanni·Christopher Messenger·Danièle A. Steer·John Veitch
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Abstract

The observation of binary neutron star merger GW170817, along with its optical counterpart, provided the first constraint on the Hubble constant $H_0$ using gravitational wave standard sirens. When no counterpart is identified, a galaxy catalog can be used to provide the necessary redshift information. However, the true host might not be contained in a catalog which is not complete out to the limit of gravitational-wave detectability. These electromagnetic and gravitational-wave selection effects must be accounted for. We describe and implement a method to estimate $H_0$ using both the counterpart and the galaxy catalog standard siren methods. We perform a series of mock data analyses using binary neutron star mergers to confirm our ability to recover an unbiased estimate of $H_0$. Our simulations used a simplified universe with no redshift uncertainties or galaxy clustering, but with different magnitude-limited catalogs and assumed host galaxy properties, to test our treatment of both selection effects. We explore how the incompleteness of catalogs affects the final measurement of $H_0$, as well as the effect of weighting each galaxy's likelihood of being a host by its luminosity. In our most realistic simulation, where the simulated catalog is about three times denser than the density of galaxies in the local universe, we find that a 4.4\% measurement precision can be reached using galaxy catalogs with 50\% completeness and $\sim 250$ binary neutron star detections with sensitivity similar to that of Advanced LIGO's second observing run.

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Rachel Gray, Ignacio Magaña Hernandez, Hong Qi, Ankan Sur, Patrick R. Brady, Hsin-Yu Chen, Will M. Farr, Maya Fishbach, Jonathan R. Gair, Archisman Ghosh, Daniel E. Holz, Simone Mastrogiovanni, Christopher Messenger, Danièle A. Steer, John Veitch. 2019-08-16. Cosmological Inference using Gravitational Wave Standard Sirens: A Mock Data Challenge. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.101.122001

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