New Constraints on the Supranuclear Equation of State and the Hubble Constant from Nuclear Physics — Multi-Messenger Astronomy [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11355


Neutron-star mergers are associated with violent phenomena that probe physical principles under extreme conditions that are not reproducible in any terrestrial laboratory. Thus, their multi-messenger analysis combining gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signatures from multiple wavelengths is not only of astrophysical interest, but it also allows studying the behavior of supranuclear dense matter, testing the fabric of spacetime, probing the principles of general relativity, and measuring the expansion rate of the Universe. In this work, we perform a multi-messenger analysis of the gravitational wave signal GW170817 and its electromagnetic counterparts AT2017gfo and GRB170817A. By incorporating information from the NICER observation of PSR J0030+0451, the radio observations of PSR J0740+6620, and nuclear theory computations using chiral effective field theory, we provide new constraints on the neutron-star equation of state and the Hubble constant. For our analysis, we make use of the new waveform approximant IMRPhenomPv2_NRTidalv2 for the interpretation of the gravitational wave signal, we employ a newly developed kilonova model, and we derive a new prediction for the debris disk mass surrounding the binary neutron star merger remnant. We determine the radius of a 1.4 solar mass neutron star to be $R_{1.4M_\odot}=10.98^{+0.37}{-0.38} \rm km$ at $1\sigma$ uncertainty and $R{1.4M_\odot}=10.98^{+1.00}{-0.69} \rm km$ at $2\sigma$ uncertainty. In addition, we estimate the Hubble constant to be $H_0=68.4^{+5.2}{-4.7}\ \rm km /Mpc/s$ at $1\sigma$ uncertainty. We test the consistency of our results and the robustness of our methods by also analyzing the second binary neutron-star merger detection GW190425 and the fact that no electromagnetic counterpart was observed for this event.

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T. Dietrich, M. Coughlin, P. Pang, et. al.
Thu, 27 Feb 20
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