A Measurement of the Hubble Constant using Gravitational Waves from the Binary Merger GW190814

TL;DR

This paper applies a gravitational-wave based statistical method to estimate the Hubble constant using GW190814 and GW170817, demonstrating improved constraints with multiple events and different posterior samples.

Contribution

It validates and extends a 1986 gravitational-wave method for measuring Hubble constant with new GW events and posterior analyses, improving constraint precision.

Findings

Combined GW170817 and GW190814 data yields H0 = 70^{+29}_{-18} km/s/Mpc.

Higher galaxy luminosity thresholds slightly increase H0 estimates.

Using different posterior samples tightens the H0 constraint.

Abstract

We present a test of the statistical method introduced by Bernard F. Shutz in 1986 using only gravitational waves to infer the Hubble constant ($\text{H}_0$) from GW190814, the first high-probability neutron-star--black-hole (NS-BH) merger candidate detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer. We apply a baseline test of this method to the binary neutron star (BNS) merger GW170817 and find $\text{H}_0 = 70^{+35.0}_{-18.0}$km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ (maximum {\it a posteriori} and 68.3\% highest density posterior interval) for a galaxy $B$-band luminosity threshold of $L_B \geq 0.001 L_B^*$ with a correction for catalog incompleteness. Repeating the calculation for GW190814, we obtain $\text{H}_0 = 67^{+41.0}_{-26.0}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ and $\text{H}_0 = 71^{+34.0}_{-30.0}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ for $L_B \geq 0.001 L_B^*$ and $L_B \geq 0.626 L_B^*$, respectively. Combining the posteriors for both events yields $\text{H}_0 = 70^{+29.0}_{-18.0}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$, demonstrating the improvement on constraints when using multiple gravitational-wave events. We also confirm the results of other works that adopt this method, showing that increasing the $L_B$ threshold enhances the posterior structure and slightly shifts the distribution's peak to higher $\text{H}_0$ values. We repeat the joint inference using the low-spin PhenomPNRT (Abbott et al. 2019a) and the newly available combined (SEOBNRv4PHM + IMRPhenomPv3HM; Abbott et al. 2020) posterior samples for GW170817 and GW190814, respectively, achieving a tighter constraint of $\text{H}_0 = 69^{+29.0}_{-14.0}$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$.