Host Galaxies Catalog Used in LIGO Searches for Compact Binary Coalescence Events

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive galaxy catalog with detailed properties to aid LIGO's search for gravitational waves from binary coalescence events, improving rate estimates and population analyses.

Contribution

The authors provide an updated galaxy catalog with error estimates and discuss its application in gravitational-wave source rate constraints and population studies.

Findings

Catalog includes sky position, distance, luminosity, and errors.

Helps interpret LIGO data for binary coalescence rates.

Applicable to other galaxy population analyses.

Abstract

An up-to-date catalog of nearby galaxies considered as hosts of binary compact objects is provided with complete information about sky position, distance, extinction-corrected blue luminosity and error estimates. With our current understanding of binary evolution, rates of formation and coalescence for binary compact objects scale with massive-star formation and hence the (extinction-corrected) blue luminosity of host galaxies. Coalescence events in binary compact objects are among the most promising gravitational-wave sources for ground-based gravitational-wave detectors such as LIGO. Our catalog and associated error estimates are important for the interpretation of analyses, carried out for LIGO, to constrain the rates of compact binary coalescence, given an astrophysical population model for the sources considered. We discuss how the notion of effective distance, created to account for the antenna pattern of a gravitational-wave detector, must be used in conjunction with our catalog. We note that the catalog provided can be used on other astronomical analysis of populations that scale with galaxy blue luminosity.