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arXiv · 1910.08353

Cross-correlation of the astrophysical gravitational-wave background with galaxy clustering

Guadalupe Cañas-Herrera·Omar Contigiani·Valeri Vardanyan
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Abstract

We investigate the correlation between the distribution of galaxies and the predicted gravitational-wave background of astrophysical origin. We show that the large angular scale anisotropies of this background are dominated by nearby non-linear structure, which depends on the notoriously hard to model galaxy power spectrum at small scales. In contrast, we report that the cross-correlation of this signal with galaxy catalogues depends only on linear scales and can be used to constrain the average contribution to the gravitational-wave background as a function of time. Using mock data based on a simplified model, we explore the effects of galaxy bias, angular resolution and the matter abundance on these constraints. Our results suggest that, when combined with galaxy surveys, the gravitational-wave background can be a powerful probe for both gravitational-wave merger physics and cosmology.

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Guadalupe Cañas-Herrera, Omar Contigiani, Valeri Vardanyan. 2019-10-18. Cross-correlation of the astrophysical gravitational-wave background with galaxy clustering. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.102.043513

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