Cosmic Cartography II: completing galaxy catalogs for gravitational-wave cosmology
arXiv:2507.12171 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2026/01/013
Abstract
The dark siren method exploits the complementarity between gravitational-wave binary coalescence signals and galaxy catalogs originating from the same regions of space. However, all galaxy catalogs are incomplete, i.e. they only include a subset of all galaxies, typically being biased towards the bright end of the luminosity distribution. This sub-selection systematically affects the dark siren inference of the Hubble constant , so a completeness relation has to be introduced that accounts for the missing objects. In the literature it is standard to assume that the missing galaxies are uniformly distributed across the sky and that the galaxy magnitude distribution is known. In this work we develop a novel method which improves upon these assumptions and reconstructs the underlying true galaxy field, respecting the spatial correlation of galaxies on large scales. In our method the true magnitude distribution of galaxies is inferred alongside the spatial galaxy distribution. Our method results in an improved three-dimensional prior in redshift and sky position for the host galaxy of a GW event, which is expected to make the resulting posterior more robust. Building on our previous work, we make a number of improvements, and validate our method on simulated data based on the Millennium simulation. The inference results can be reproduced through our publicly available code base light.
We refer the busy reader to Fig. 2 for an overview of the method, and to Sec. 4.1 with Figures 7, 8 and 10 for the main results. 45 pages, 20 figures
References in corpus (58)
- GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
- HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
- Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their large-scale distribution
- Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
- Advanced LIGO
- A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km/s/Mpc Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team
- GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
- A gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant
- DESI 2024 VI: Cosmological Constraints from the Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
- DESI DR2 Results II: Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Constraints
- Sensitivity and Performance of the Advanced LIGO Detectors in the Third Observing Run
- The Connection between Galaxies and Dark Matter Structures in the Local Universe
- Merging black hole binaries: the effects of progenitor's metallicity, mass-loss rate and Eddington factor
- Inference of the cosmological parameters from gravitational waves: application to second generation interferometers
- Constraints on the cosmic expansion history from GWTC-3
- A gravitational-wave measurement of the Hubble constant following the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo
- A standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from GW170817 without the electromagnetic counterpart
- Cosmology with the lights off: Standard sirens in the Einstein Telescope era
- A Future Percent-Level Measurement of the Hubble Expansion at Redshift 0.8 With Advanced LIGO
- Cosmological Inference using Gravitational Wave Standard Sirens: A Mock Data Challenge
- GLADE: A Galaxy Catalogue for Multi-Messenger Searches in the Advanced Gravitational-Wave Detector Era
- Subhalo abundance matching and assembly bias in the EAGLE simulation
- The recycling of gas and metals in galaxy formation: predictions of a dynamical feedback model
- Cosmology in the dark: On the importance of source population models for gravitational-wave cosmology
- A statistical standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave compact object merger GW190814 and Dark Energy Survey galaxies
- Spectral sirens: cosmology from the full mass distribution of compact binaries
- Measuring the distance-redshift relation with the cross-correlation of gravitational wave standard sirens and galaxies
- GLADE+: An Extended Galaxy Catalogue for Multimessenger Searches with Advanced Gravitational-wave Detectors
- Dark matters on the scale of galaxies
- The cosmology dependence of galaxy clustering and lensing from a hybrid -body-perturbation theory model
- Dark Sirens to Resolve the Hubble-Lemaître Tension
- 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
- A halo bias function measured deeply into voids without stochasticity
- Cosmology and modified gravitational wave propagation from binary black hole population models
- Standard Siren Speeds: Improving velocities in gravitational-wave measurements of
- Generating Log-normal Mock Catalog of Galaxies in Redshift Space
- Incompleteness Matters Not: Inference of from BBH-galaxy cross-correlations
- Accurate and Efficient Halo-based Galaxy Clustering Modelling with Simulations
- Systematic uncertainty of standard sirens from the viewing angle of binary neutron star inspirals
- Mass and star formation rate of the host galaxies of compact binary mergers across cosmic time
- Current and future constraints on cosmology and modified gravitational wave friction from binary black holes
- Cross-correlating dark sirens and galaxies: constraints on from GWTC-3 of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA
- CosmoPower-JAX: high-dimensional Bayesian inference with differentiable cosmological emulators
- Cosmography with next-generation gravitational wave detectors
- Cosmology and Astrophysics with Standard Sirens and Galaxy Catalogs in View of Future Gravitational Wave Observations
- Gravitational wave populations and cosmology with neural posterior estimation
- Gravitational-wave dark siren cosmology systematics from galaxy weighting
- The clustering of dark sirens' invisible host galaxies
- Investigating the impact of galaxies' compact binary hosting probability for gravitational-wave cosmology
- Bayesian framework to infer the Hubble constant from the cross-correlation of individual gravitational wave events with galaxies
- A robust cosmic standard ruler from the cross-correlations of galaxies and dark sirens
- Mitigating the binary viewing angle bias for standard sirens
- Cosmic Cartography: Bayesian reconstruction of the galaxy density informed by large-scale structure
- Multi-spectral Sirens: Gravitational-wave Cosmology with (Multi-) Sub-populations of Binary Black Holes
- Accelerating the standard siren method: Improved constraints on modified gravitational-wave propagation with future data
- A Hubble constant estimation with dark standard sirens and galaxy cluster catalogues
- Joint Inference of Population, Cosmology, and Neutron Star Equation of State from Gravitational Waves of Dark Binary Neutron Stars