A statistical standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave compact object merger GW190814 and Dark Energy Survey galaxies

TL;DR

This paper measures the Hubble constant using gravitational wave event GW190814 as a standard siren, employing a statistical approach with galaxy catalogs from the Dark Energy Survey, and combines it with other GW events for improved cosmological constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical framework for estimating $H_0$ from GW events without electromagnetic counterparts, utilizing photometric redshift catalogs and reanalyzing previous GW events within this framework.

Findings

Estimated $H_0$ as 72.0 km/s/Mpc with uncertainties.

Demonstrated that well-localized GW events without counterparts significantly improve $H_0$ constraints.

Showed combining multiple GW events enhances the precision of cosmological measurements.

Abstract

We present a measurement of the Hubble constant $H_0$ using the gravitational wave (GW) event GW190814, which resulted from the coalescence of a 23 $M_\odot$ black hole with a 2.6 $M_\odot$ compact object, as a standard siren. No compelling electromagnetic counterpart has been identified for this event, thus our analysis accounts for thousands of potential host galaxies within a statistical framework. The redshift information is obtained from the photometric redshift (photo-$z$) catalog from the Dark Energy Survey. The luminosity distance is provided by the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave sky map. Since this GW event has the second-smallest localization volume after GW170817, GW190814 is likely to provide the best constraint on cosmology from a single standard siren without identifying an electromagnetic counterpart. Our analysis uses photo-$z$ probability distribution functions and corrects for photo-$z$ biases. We also reanalyze the binary-black hole GW170814 within this updated framework. We explore how our findings impact the $H_0$ constraints from GW170817, the only GW merger associated with a unique host galaxy. From a combination of GW190814, GW170814 and GW170817, our analysis yields $H_0 = 72.0^{+ 12}_{- 8.2 }~{\rm km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$ (68\% Highest Density Interval, HDI) for a prior in $H_0$ uniform between $[20,140]~{\rm km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$. The addition of GW190814 and GW170814 to GW170817 improves the 68\% HDI from GW170817 alone by $\sim 18\%$, showing how well-localized mergers without counterparts can provide a significant contribution to standard siren measurements, provided that a complete galaxy catalog is available at the location of the event.