Golden and Silver Dark Sirens for precise H0 measurement with HETDEX
Yixuan Dang, Ish Gupta, Robin Ciardullo, Erin Mentuch Cooper, Shiksha Pandey, Dustin Davis, Surhud More, Rachel Gray, Hsin-Yu Chen, Daniel J. Farrow, Caryl Gronwall, Donghui Jeong, Shun Saito, Donald P. Schneider, B. S. Sathyaprakash

TL;DR
This paper evaluates the potential of dark sirens, specifically golden and silver types, combined with HETDEX spectroscopic follow-up, to measure the Hubble constant (H0) with high precision using gravitational wave data.
Contribution
It demonstrates that spectroscopic surveys like HETDEX can enable precise H0 measurements with dark sirens, advancing independent cosmological constraints.
Findings
A single year of VIRUS observations can yield a few-percent H0 constraint.
Golden dark sirens are dominated by a single galaxy, simplifying redshift determination.
Silver dark sirens are more common but have multiple plausible host galaxies.
Abstract
Gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences are standard sirens that provide a direct measure of the source's luminosity distance, enabling an independent measurement of the Hubble constant (H0). While a bright siren -- a GW event with an identified electromagnetic (EM) counterpart -- provided the first such constraint, most detections, currently dominated by black hole mergers, lack EM signatures. A measurement of H0 is still possible with these dark sirens by statistically associating GW events with galaxies in existing catalogs based on the sky localization. In this work, we explore the potential of two subsets of sirens: rare golden dark sirens, for which a single galaxy dominates the H0 posterior, and silver dark sirens, which are far more common but have a larger set of plausible host galaxies. Using the fifth internal data release of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPulsars and Gravitational Waves Research · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae · Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena
