Cosmological inference from standard sirens without redshift measurements [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05073


The purpose of this work is to investigate the prospects of using the future standard siren data without redshift measurements to constrain cosmological parameters. With successful detections of gravitational wave (GW) signals an era of GW astronomy has begun. Unlike the electromagnetic domain, GW signals allow direct measurements of luminosity distances to the sources, while their redshifts remain to be measured by identifying electromagnetic counterparts. This leads to significant technical problems for almost all possible BH-BH systems. It is the major obstacle to cosmological applications of GW standard sirens. In this paper, we introduce the general framework of using luminosity distances alone for cosmological inference. The idea is to use the prior knowledge of the redshift probability distribution for coalescing sources from the intrinsic merger rates assessed with population synthesis codes. Then the posterior probability distributions for cosmological parameters can be calculated. We demonstrate the performance of our method on the simulated mock data and show that $5\%$ uncertainty of the luminosity distance measurement would enable an accurate determination of cosmological parameters. At least $10\%$ uncertainty of $D_L$ is required to derive unbiased parameters fits. We also find that in order to get $1\%$ accuracy in $H_0$ we need about $10^5$ events with $D_L$ measured at $10\%$ uncertainty level.

Read this paper on arXiv…

X. Ding, M. Biesiada, X. Zheng, et. al.
Wed, 17 Jan 18
50/51

Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. To be submitted to JCAP