High-precision Measurements of Cosmic Curvature from Gravitational Wave and Cosmic Chronometer Observations

Abstract

Although the spatial curvature has been measured with very high precision, it still suffers from the well-known cosmic curvature tension. In this paper, we use an improved method to determine the cosmic curvature, by using the simulated data of binary neutron star mergers observed by the second generation space-based DECi-hertz Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (DECIGO). By applying the Hubble parameter observations of cosmic chronometers to the DECIGO standard sirens, we explore different possibilities of making measurements of the cosmic curvature referring to a distant past: one is to reconstruct the Hubble parameters through the Gaussian process without the influence of hypothetical models, and the other is deriving constraints on Ω K in the framework of the non-flat Λ cold dark matter model. It is shown that in the improved method DECIGO could provide a reliable and stringent constraint on the cosmic curvature (Ω K = −0.007 ± 0.016), while we could only expect the zero cosmic curvature to be established at the precision of ΔΩ K = 0.11 in the second model-dependent method. Therefore, our results indicate that in the framework of methodology proposed in this paper, the increasing number of well-measured standard sirens in DECIGO could significantly reduce the bias of estimations for cosmic curvature. Such a constraint is also comparable to the precision of Planck 2018 results with the newest cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations (ΔΩ K ≈ 0.018), based on the concordance ΛCDM model.