Rapid Hubble constant inference from GW170817 using GPU-accelerated nested sampling: prior sensitivity and the limits of post-hoc reweighting

Abstract

The bright-siren measurement of the Hubble constant from GW170817 (Abbott et al. 2017) assumes that switching from a volumetric to a uniform-in-$d_L$ luminosity-distance prior can be implemented by post-hoc reweighting of the baseline samples, rather than by re-running the inference under the target prior. Using a GPU-native heterodyned nested sampling pipeline that completes the full $n_{\rm live}=5000$ analysis in about 13 min on a single A100, we recompute the GW170817 $H_0$ posterior under four prior variants for the modern aligned-spin tidal waveform IMRPhenomXAS_NRTidalv3. Switching from the volumetric to a uniform-in-$d_L$ distance prior raises the high-tail probability $P(H_0>120\,\mathrm{km/s/Mpc})$ from 0.017 to 0.159 when imposed during sampling and shifts the weighted-median $H_0$ from 77.6 to 87.6 km/s/Mpc, while the binned MAP stays at 70.5 km/s/Mpc: both the tail and the bulk move under a change of prior that leaves the mode in place. Post-hoc reweighting of the baseline samples to the same target prior recovers only $P=0.041$ in the tail, approximately 17% of the directly sampled shift. The three prior variants that carry an independent nested sampling evidence agree to $\Delta\ln Z\lesssim 1.8$, so the data show at most a weak preference among the distance priors; the tail and bulk shifts are therefore properties of the prior, not a data update. Targeted mode-isolated runs reveal a $(d_L,\iota)$ bimodality whose high-$H_0$, low-$d_L$ branch (Mode B; $|\ln\mathcal{B}_{\rm B/A}|<1$) the volumetric prior assigns negligible mass: this is the mechanism behind the reweighting deficit. The reweighted posterior has a lower effective sample size than the baseline, independently flagging the coverage failure. The runtime budget makes full-sample prior-sensitivity reruns the default robustness tool for bright-siren cosmology, replacing post-hoc reweighting.