Measurements of the Hubble constant from combinations of supernovae and radio quasars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model-independent method combining supernovae and radio quasars to measure the Hubble constant, achieving 1% precision and consistent with local universe measurements, with no detected redshift-dependent bias.

Contribution

The study develops an improved, model-independent approach using neural networks to combine supernova and radio quasar data for precise Hubble constant estimation.

Findings

H0 measured as approximately 73.5 km/s/Mpc with 1% precision

Results are consistent with local measurements from SH0ES and H0LiCOW

No significant redshift-dependent systematic effects detected

Abstract

In this letter, we propose an improved cosmological model independent method of determining the value of the Hubble constant $H_0$. The method uses unanchored luminosity distances $H_0d_L(z)$ from SN Ia Pantheon data combined with angular diameter distances $d_A(z)$ from a sample of intermediate luminosity radio quasars calibrated as standard rulers. The distance duality relation between $d_L(z)$ and $d_A(z)$, which is robust and independent of any cosmological model, allows to disentangle $H_0$ from such combination. However, the number of redshift matched quasars and SN Ia pairs is small (37 data-points). Hence, we take an advantage from the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method to recover the $d_A(z)$ relation from a network trained on full 120 radio quasar sample. In this case, the result is unambiguously consistent with values of $H_0$ obtained from local probes by SH0ES and H0LiCOW collaborations. Three statistical summary measures: weighted mean $\widetilde{H}_0=73.51(\pm0.67) {~km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$, median $Med(H_0)=74.71(\pm4.08) {~km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$ and MCMC simulated posterior distribution $H_0=73.52^{+0.66}_{-0.68} {~km~s^{-1}~Mpc^{-1}}$ are fully consistent with each other and the precision reached $1\%$ level. This is encouraging for the future applications of our method. Because individual measurements of $H_0$ are related to different redshifts spanning the range $z=0.5 - 2.0$, we take advantage of this fact to check if there is any noticeable trend in $H_0$ measurements with redshift of objects used for this purpose. However, our result is that the data we used strongly support the lack of such systematic effects.