Echoes from the dark: Galaxy catalog incompleteness in standard siren cosmology

Abstract

Gravitational wave observations can be combined with galaxy catalogs to constrain cosmology and test modified gravity theories using the standard siren method. However, galaxy catalogs are intrinsically incomplete due to observational limitations, potentially leaving host galaxies undetected, thereby weakening constraints and potentially introducing systematic errors. In this work, we present a self-consistent framework to study catalog incompleteness and host weighting effects, implemented in the publicly available CHIMERA pipeline. We obtain joint cosmological and astrophysical population constraints from 100 binary black hole (BBH) events in a LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O5-like configuration using spectroscopic galaxy catalogs with varying completeness levels and stellar-mass host weighting schemes. We find percent-level constraints on $H_0$ with complete catalogs, reaching precisions of 1.6%, 1.3%, and 0.9% for constant, linear, and quadratic mass weighting, respectively. As completeness decreases, the precision degrades following a sigmoid trend, with a threshold and steepness that increase for stronger weightings. Simultaneously, the correlation between $H_0$ and the BBH population mass scale increases, making results more sensitive to assumptions about the astrophysical population. Remarkably, 2% precision remains achievable even when catalogs contain only 50% of the potential host galaxies within the gravitational wave detection horizon, while 1% precision requires host probabilities scaling with stellar mass squared. The results are robust against host weighting mismodeling, even at moderate completeness levels. This work further highlights the importance of spectroscopic galaxy surveys in standard siren cosmology and provides a pathway for developing the science case of future facilities.