The Distance to NGC 4993: The Host Galaxy of the Gravitational-wave Event GW170817

Abstract

The historic detection of gravitational waves from a binary neutron star merger (GW170817) and its electromagnetic counterpart led to the first accurate (sub-arcsecond) localization of a gravitational-wave event. The transient was found to be $\sim$10" from the nucleus of the S0 galaxy NGC 4993. We report here the luminosity distance to this galaxy using two independent methods. (1) Based on our MUSE/VLT measurement of the heliocentric redshift ($z_{\mathrm{helio}}=0.009783\pm 0.000023$) we infer the systemic recession velocity of the NGC 4993 group of galaxies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) frame to be $v_{\mathrm{CMB}}=3231\pm 53$ km s${}^{-1}$. Using constrained cosmological simulations we estimate the line-of-sight peculiar velocity to be $v_{\mathrm{pec}}=307\pm 230$ km s${}^{-1}$, resulting in a cosmic velocity of $v_{\mathrm{cosmic}}=2924\pm 236$ km s${}^{-1}$ ($z_{\mathrm{cosmic}}=0.00980\pm 0.00079$) and a distance of $D_z=40.4\pm 3.4$ Mpc assuming a local Hubble constant of $H_0=73.24\pm 1.74$ km s${}^{-1}$ Mpc${}^{-1}$. (2) Using Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the effective radius (15.5" $\pm$ 1.5") and contained intensity and MUSE/VLT measurements of the velocity dispersion, we place NGC 4993 on the Fundamental Plane (FP) of E and S0 galaxies. Comparing to a frame of 10 clusters containing 226 galaxies, this yields a distance estimate of $D_{\mathrm{FP}}=44.0\pm 7.5$ Mpc. The combined redshift and FP distance is $D_{NGC4993}=41.0\pm 3.1$ Mpc. This 'electromagnetic' distance estimate is consistent with the independent measurement of the distance to GW170817 as obtained from the gravitational-wave signal ($D_{\mathrm{GW}}=43.8_{-6.9}^{+2.9}$ Mpc) and confirms that GW170817 occurred in NGC 4993.

9 pages, 5 figures

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