Constraint on the radius of five-dimensional dS spacetime with GW170817 and GRB 170817A

Abstract

The recent detections of the gravitational wave (GW) event GW170817 and its electromagnetic counterpart GRB 170817A produced by a binary neutron star (NS) merger is a new milestone of multimessenger astronomy. The time interval between these two signals has attracted widespread attention from physicists. In the braneworld scenario, GWs could propagate through the bulk while electromagnetic waves (EMWs) are bounded on the brane, i.e., our Universe. Therefore, the trajectories of GWs and EMWs may follow different pathes. If GWs and EMWs are originated simultaneously from the same source on the brane, they are expected to arrive at the observer successively. Consequently, the time delay between GW170817 and GRB 170817A may carry the information of the extra dimension. In this paper, we try to investigate the phenomenon in the context of a five-dimensional dS ($\text{dS}_5$) spacetime. We first study two special Universe models, i.e., de Sitter and Einstein-de Sitter models, and calculate the gravitation horizon radius in each case. For the real Universe, we then consider the $\Lambda$CDM model. Our results show that for the de Sitter model of the Universe, the $\text{dS}_5$ radius could not contribute to the time delay. With the data of the observation, we constrain the $\text{dS}_5$ radius to $\ell\gtrsim7.5\times10^{2}\,\text{Tpc}$ for the Einstein-de Sitter model and $\ell\gtrsim2.4\times10^{3}\,\text{Tpc}$ for the $\Lambda$CDM model. After considering the uncertainty in the source redshift and the time-lags given by different astrophysical processes of the binary NS merger, we find that our constraints are not sensitive to the redshift in the range of (0.005, 0.01) and the time-lag in the range of (-100s, 1.734s).