Synergy between CSST galaxy survey and gravitational-wave observation: Inferring the Hubble constant from dark standard sirens

Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences encode the absolute luminosity distances of GW sources. Once the redshifts of GW sources are known, one can use the distance-redshift relation to constrain cosmological parameters. One way to obtain the redshifts is to localize GW sources by GW observations and then use galaxy catalogs to determine redshifts from a statistical analysis of redshift information of the potential host galaxies, commonly referred to as the dark siren method. The third-generation (3G) GW detectors are planned to work in the 2030s and will observe numerous compact binary coalescences. Using these GW events as dark sirens requires high-quality galaxy catalogs from future sky survey projects. The China Space Station Telescope (CSST) will be launched in 2024 and will observe billions of galaxies within a 17500 deg$^2$ survey area with redshift up to $z\sim 4$, providing photometric and spectroscopic galaxy catalogs. In this work, we simulate the CSST galaxy catalogs and the 5-year GW data from the 3G GW detectors and combine them to infer the Hubble constant ($H_0$). Our results show that the measurement precision of $H_0$ could reach the sub-percent level, meeting the standard of precision cosmology. We conclude that the synergy between CSST and the 3G GW detectors is of great significance in measuring the Hubble constant.