Cosmology in the dark: On the importance of source population models for gravitational-wave cosmology
read the original abstract
Knowledge of the shape of the mass spectrum of compact objects can be used to help break the degeneracy between the mass and redshift of the gravitational wave (GW) sources, and thus can be used to infer cosmological parameters in the absence of redshift measurements obtained from electromagnetic observations. In this paper, we study extensively different aspects of this approach, including its computational limits and achievable accuracy. We focus on ground-based detectors with current and future sensitivities, we first perform the analysis of an extensive set of simulated data with a hierarchical Bayesian scheme inferring population and cosmological parameters. We consider a population model (power-law plus Gaussian) which exhibits characteristic scales (extremes of the mass spectrum, presence of an accumulation point) that allows an indirect estimate of the source redshift. Our analysis of this catalog highlights and quantifies the tight interplay between source population and cosmological parameters, as well as the influence of initial assumptions (whether formulated on the source or cosmological parameters). We then validate our results by an "end-to-end" analysis using simulated GW data and posterior samples generated from Bayesian samplers used for GW parameter estimation, thus mirroring the analysis chain used for observational data for the first time in literature. Our results then lead us to re-examine the estimation of $H_0$ obtained with GWTC-1, and we show explicitly how population assumptions impact the final $H_0$ result. Our results underline the importance of inferring population and cosmological parameters jointly (and not separately as is often assumed). The only exception, as we discuss, is if an electromagnetic counterpart was to be observed for all the BBH events: then the population assumptions have less impact on the estimation of cosmological parameters.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
-
Prospect of Measuring the Cosmic Dipole by Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves Associated with Galaxy Surveys
Simulations forecast that 10 years of Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer data could detect the cosmic dipole magnitude using strongly lensed GW events, with tighter bounds from combining double, triple, and quadru...
-
End-to-End Population Inference from Gravitational-Wave Strain using Transformers
Dingo-Pop uses a transformer to perform amortized, end-to-end population inference from GW strain data in seconds, bypassing per-event Monte Carlo sampling.
-
Constraining the lensing dispersion from the angular clustering of binary black hole mergers
Angular auto-correlation of gravitational wave sources decreases with lensing dispersion, and joint cross-correlation with galaxies partially breaks the degeneracy with source bias.
-
Model-independent H0 from GWTC-4 standard sirens and TDCOSMO 2025 strong lensing time delays
Combining GWTC-4 standard sirens with TDCOSMO2025 lensing data under the distance sum rule yields H0 = 83.78 +12.53/-10.23 km/s/Mpc (13.6% precision) in one configuration, consistent with both Planck and SH0ES.
-
Gravitational-wave constraints on $H_0$ are robust to (putative) redshift evolution in the binary black hole mass spectrum at current sensitivity
Spectral-siren H0 constraints from GWTC-4.0 binary black holes remain robust when the mass spectrum is permitted to evolve with redshift at current detector sensitivity.
-
Blinded Mock Data Challenge: Is the Spectral Siren Technique Robust for Measuring the Hubble Constant?
The spectral siren technique requires independent knowledge of binary black hole mass distributions at all redshifts to an accuracy better than the statistical uncertainty, or else the Hubble constant measurement is biased.
-
Synergy between CSST and third-generation gravitational-wave detectors: Inferring cosmological parameters using cross-correlation of dark sirens and galaxies
Forecasts that cross-correlating 3G GW dark sirens with CSST photometric galaxies yields 1.04% precision on H0 and 2.04% on Omega_m while also constraining GW clustering bias.
-
On the use of the Derivative Approximation for Likelihoods for Gravitational Wave Inference
DALI extends the Fisher Matrix to higher orders and approximates MCMC posteriors for GW events at 55 times lower cost, with singlet-DALI offering better accuracy and the GWDALI code providing automatic differentiation...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.