Abstract
Abstract This paper presents the gravitational-wave measurement of the Hubble constant (H 0) using the detections from the first and second observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detector network. The presence of the transient electromagnetic counterpart of the binary neutron star GW170817 led to the first standard-siren measurement of H 0. Here we additionally use binary black hole detections in conjunction with galaxy catalogs and report a joint measurement. Our updated measurement is H 0 = 69 − 8 + 16 km s−1 Mpc−1 (68.3% of the highest density posterior interval with a flat-in-log prior) which is an improvement by a factor of 1.04 (about 4%) over the GW170817-only value of 69 − 8 + 17 km s−1 Mpc−1. A significant additional contribution currently comes from GW170814, a loud and well-localized detection from a part of the sky thoroughly covered by the Dark Energy Survey. With numerous detections anticipated over the upcoming years, an exhaustive understanding of other systematic effects are also going to become increasingly important. These results establish the path to cosmology using gravitational-wave observations with and without transient electromagnetic counterparts.
Highlights
Gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences allow for the direct measurement of the luminosity distance to their source
We describe in more detail the galaxy catalogs that we use, quantify the probability that the host galaxy for each event is in the galaxy catalog that is used for its analysis, and discuss the assessment of the completeness over the relevant localization volume for the best localized events
We carry out our analysis with a prior on H0 uniform in the interval of [20, 140] km s−1 Mpc−1; we report our final results using a flatin-log prior p (H0 ) μ H0-1 in the same interval for ease of comparison with previous studies
Summary
Gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences allow for the direct measurement of the luminosity distance to their source. This makes them standard-distance indicators, and in conjunction with an identified host galaxy or a set of possible host galaxies, they can be used as standard sirens to construct a redshift-distance relationship and measure cosmological parameters like the Hubble constant (H0; Schutz 1986; Holz & Hughes 2005; MacLeod & Hogan 2008; Nissanke et al 2010; Sathyaprakash et al 2010). Transient associated with the host galaxy NGC4993, led to a first standard-siren measurement of H0 (Abbott et al 2017a) This measurement is independent of other state-of-the-art measurements of H0, and in particular, independent of the cosmic distance ladder used to calibrate standardizable sources like SNe Ia (Type Ia supernovae). With the Planck 2018 data release (Planck Collaboration et al 2020), and the recalibration of supernovae using Large Magellanic
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