Improved statistic to identify strongly lensed gravitational wave events

Abstract

As the number of detected gravitational wave sources increase with increasing sensitivity of the gravitational wave observatories, observing strongly lensed pair of events will become a real possibility. Lensed GW events will have very accurately measured time delays, as well as magnification ratios. If the corresponding lens system can be identified electromagnetically and the redshifts of the lens and the host galaxy can be measured, such events can be used to constrain important astrophysical parameters of the lens system. As most lensing events will have image separations that will be significantly smaller than the GW event localization uncertainties, it is important that we develop diagnostics that will aid in the robust identification of such lensed events. We define a new statistic based on the joint probability of lensing observables that can be used to discriminate lensed pair of events from the unlensed ones. To this end, we carry out simulations of lensed GW events to infer the distribution of the relative time delays, relative magnifications sub-divided by the type of lensed images. We compare this distribution to a similar one obtained for random unlensed event pairs. Our improved statistic can be used to improve the existing ranking approach adopted by the search pipelines in order to down-select event pairs for joint parameter estimates. The distributions we obtain can further be used to define more informative priors in joint parameter estimation analyses for candidate lensed events.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (18)

• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• Exploring the Sensitivity of Next Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors
• The Structure & Dynamics of Massive Early-type Galaxies: On Homology, Isothermality and Isotropy inside one Effective Radius
• Search for gravitational lensing signatures in LIGO-Virgo binary black hole events
• What if LIGO's gravitational wave detections are strongly lensed by massive galaxy clusters?
• Observational signatures of microlensing in gravitational waves at LIGO/Virgo frequencies
• The shapes of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Identifying strong gravitational-wave lensing during the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• Gravitational Lensing of Gravitational Waves: Effect of Microlens Population in Lensing Galaxies
• On the waveforms of gravitationally lensed gravitational waves
• Bayesian statistical framework for identifying strongly lensed gravitational-wave signals
• Search for Lensed Gravitational Waves Including Morse Phase Information: An Intriguing Candidate in O2
• Impact of astrophysical binary coalescence timescales on the rate of lensed gravitational wave events
• On building a cluster watch-list for identifying strongly lensed supernovae, gravitational waves and kilonovae
• The Discovery of a Five-Image Lensed Quasar at z = 3.34 using PanSTARRS1 and Gaia
• Event rate predictions of strongly lensed gravitational waves with detector networks and more realistic templates
• Search for lensing signatures in the gravitational-wave observations from the first half of LIGO-Virgo's third observing run

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Follow-up Analyses to the O3 LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Lensing Searches
• Lensing or luck? False alarm probabilities for gravitational lensing of gravitational waves
• Cosmography using strongly lensed gravitational waves from binary black holes
• Exploring the Impact of Microlensing on Gravitational Wave Signals: Biases, Population Characteristics, and Prospects for Detection
• Gravitational Lensing of Gravitational Waves: Probability of Microlensing in Galaxy-Scale Lens Population
• The Return of GOLUM: Improving Distributed Joint Parameter Estimation for Strongly-Lensed Gravitational Waves
• Unveiling Microlensing Biases in Testing General Relativity with Gravitational Waves
• Multi-messenger Gravitational Lensing
• SLICK: Strong Lensing Identification of Candidates Kindred in gravitational wave data
• Detectability of strongly lensed gravitational waves using model-independent image parameters
• Waveform systematics in identifying strongly gravitationally lensed gravitational waves: Posterior overlap method
• False positives for gravitational lensing: the gravitational-wave perspective
• Probing charge of compact objects with gravitational microlensing of gravitational waves
• Uncovering faint lensed gravitational-wave signals and reprioritizing their follow-up analysis using galaxy lensing forecasts with detected counterparts
• Mitigating the effect of the population model uncertainty on the strong lensing Bayes factor using nonparametric methods
• A ${\chi }^2$ statistic for the identification of strongly lensed gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences
• Can Eccentric Binary Black Hole Signals Mimic Gravitational-Wave Microlensing?
• Mock Catalogs of Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves via A Halo Model Approach with Ground-based Detectors