A Hubble constant estimation with dark standard sirens and galaxy cluster catalogues

TL;DR

This study uses galaxy cluster catalogues to improve gravitational-wave based measurements of the Hubble constant, achieving more precise estimates than traditional methods and paving the way for future cosmography with upcoming observatories.

Contribution

It adapts the gwcosmo pipeline to incorporate galaxy cluster catalogues for dark standard siren H_0 measurements, demonstrating enhanced precision.

Findings

H_0 estimates of 77 and 81 km/s/Mpc with improved precision

Precision improved by 10% and 38% over traditional galaxy catalogues

Method demonstrates potential for future cosmography with gravitational-wave data

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the possibility of using galaxy cluster catalogues to provide redshift support for a gravitational-wave dark standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant $H_0$. We adapt the cosmology inference pipeline gwcosmo to handle galaxy cluster catalogues. Together with binary black holes from the GWTC-3, we use galaxy cluster data from the PSZ2 and the eRASS catalogues. With these catalogues, we obtain $H_0 = 77^{+10}_{-10}$ and $81^{+8}_{-8}\, \text{km}\, \text{s}^{-1}\, \text{Mpc}^{-1}$ respectively, which demonstrates improvements on precision by factors of 10% and 38% respectively over the traditional galaxy catalogue result. This exploratory work paves the way towards precise and accurate cosmography making use of distant compact binary mergers from upcoming observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detector network and future gravitational-wave observatories.