Measuring the star formation rate with gravitational waves from binary black holes

TL;DR

This paper proposes using gravitational wave detections from binary black holes by future detectors to accurately measure the cosmic star formation rate up to high redshifts, overcoming challenges of electromagnetic methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to determine the star formation history using gravitational wave data, enabling high-precision measurements up to redshift 10.

Findings

Detection rates could reach up to 56,740 per month.

Volumetric SFR parameters can be constrained to a few percent.

Merger rate can be measured to 3% accuracy at redshift ~2.

Abstract

A measurement of the history of cosmic star formation is central to understand the origin and evolution of galaxies. The measurement is extremely challenging using electromagnetic radiation: significant modeling is required to convert luminosity to mass, and to properly account for dust attenuation, for example. Here we show how detections of gravitational waves from inspiraling binary black holes made by proposed third-generation detectors can be used to measure the star formation rate (SFR) of massive stars with high precision up to redshifts of ~10. Depending on the time-delay model, the predicted detection rates ranges from ~2310 to ~56,740 per month with the current measurement of local merger rate density. With 30,000 detections, parameters describing the volumetric SFR can be constrained at the few percent level, and the volumetric merger rate can be directly measured to 3% at z ~ 2. Given a parameterized SFR, the characteristic delay time between binary formation and merger can be measured to ~60%.