Impact of modelling galaxy redshift uncertainties on the gravitational-wave dark standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gravitational wave science is a new and rapidly expanding field of observational astronomy. Multimessenger observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 have provided some iconic results including the first gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant, opening up a new way to probe cosmology. The majority of the compact binary sources observed in gravitational waves are, however, without bright electromagnetic counterparts. In these cases, one can fall back on the ‘dark standard siren’ approach to include information statistically from potential host galaxies. For such a measurement, we need to be cautious about all possible sources of systematic errors. In this paper, we begin to study the possible errors coming from the galaxy catalogue sector, and in particular, look into the effect of galaxy redshift uncertainties for the cases where these are photometry-based. We recalculate the dark standard siren Hubble constant using the latest third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3) events and associated galaxy catalogues, with different galaxy redshift uncertainty models, namely, the standard Gaussian, a modified Lorentzian, and no uncertainty at all. We find that not using redshift uncertainties at all can lead to a potential bias comparable with other potential systematic effects previously considered for the GWTC-3 H0 measurement (however still small compared to the overall statistical error in this measurement). The difference between different uncertainty models leads to small differences in the results for the current data; their impact is much smaller than the current statistical errors and other potential sources of systematic errors which have been considered in previous robustness studies.