A Pixelated Approach to Galaxy Catalogue Incompleteness: Improving the Dark Siren Measurement of the Hubble Constant

Abstract

The use of gravitational wave standard sirens for cosmological analyses is becoming well known, with particular interest in measuring the Hubble constant, $H_0$, and in shedding light on the current tension between early- and late-time measurements. The current tension is over $4\sigma$ and standard sirens will be able to provide a completely independent measurement. Dark sirens (binary black hole or neutron star mergers with no electromagnetic counterparts) can be informative if the missing redshift information is provided through the use of galaxy catalogues to identify potential host galaxies of the merger. However, galaxy catalogue incompleteness affects this analysis, and accurate modelling of it is essential for obtaining an unbiased measurement of $H_0$. Previously this has been done by assuming uniform completeness within the sky area of a gravitational wave event. This paper presents an updated methodology in which the completeness of the galaxy catalogue is estimated in a directionally-dependent matter, by pixelating the sky and computing the completeness of the galaxy catalogue along each line of sight. The $H_0$ inference for a single event is carried out on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and the pixels are combined for the final result. A reanalysis of the events in the first gravitational wave transient catalogue (GWTC-1) leads to an improvement on the measured value of $H_0$ of approximately 5% compared to the 68.3% highest-density interval of the equivalent LIGO and Virgo result, with $H_0=68.8_{-7.8}^{+15.9}$ km s${}^{-1}$ Mpc${}^{-1}$.

14 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (10)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
• Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics Beyond LambdaCDM
• GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M${}_{\odot }$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M${}_{\odot }$ Compact Object
• A gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant
• Observation of gravitational waves from two neutron star-black hole coalescences
• First measurement of the Hubble constant from a dark standard siren using the Dark Energy Survey galaxies and the LIGO/Virgo binary-black-hole merger GW170814
• Precision of Hubble constant derived using black hole binary absolute distances and statistical redshift information
• Cosmology in the dark: On the importance of source population models for gravitational-wave cosmology
• Observational Selection Effects with Ground-based Gravitational Wave Detectors

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Constraints on the cosmic expansion history from GWTC-3
• Spectral sirens: cosmology from the full mass distribution of compact binaries
• A standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant using gravitational wave events from the first three LIGO/Virgo observing runs and the DESI Legacy Survey
• The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy catalog approach for gravitational wave cosmology
• Cosmography using strongly lensed gravitational waves from binary black holes
• Unveiling the Universe with Emerging Cosmological Probes
• Effective speed of gravitational waves
• Investigating the Dominant Environmental Quenching Process in UVCANDELS/COSMOS Groups