A measurement of Hubble's Constant using Fast Radio Bursts
Abstract
We constrain the Hubble constant H using Fast Radio Burst (FRB) observations from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Murriyang (Parkes) radio telescopes. We use the redshift-dispersion measure (`Macquart') relationship, accounting for the intrinsic luminosity function, cosmological gas distribution, population evolution, host galaxy contributions to the dispersion measure (DM), and observational biases due to burst duration and telescope beamshape. Using an updated sample of 16 ASKAP FRBs detected by the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) Survey and localised to their host galaxies, and 60 unlocalised FRBs from Parkes and ASKAP, our best-fitting value of H is calculated to be km s Mpc. Uncertainties in FRB energetics and DM produce larger uncertainties in the inferred value of H compared to previous FRB-based estimates. Using a prior on H covering the 67--74 km s Mpc range, we estimate a median DM km s Mpc, exceeding previous estimates. We confirm that the FRB population evolves with redshift similarly to the star-formation rate. We use a Schechter luminosity function to constrain the maximum FRB energy to be erg assuming a characteristic FRB emission bandwidth of 1 GHz at 1.3 GHz, and the cumulative luminosity index to be . We demonstrate with a sample of 100 mock FRBs that H can be measured with an uncertainty of km s Mpc, demonstrating the potential for clarifying the Hubble tension with an upgraded ASKAP FRB search system. Last, we explore a range of sample and selection biases that affect FRB analyses.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.00819,
title = {A measurement of Hubble's Constant using Fast Radio Bursts},
author = {C. W. James and E. M. Ghosh and J. X. Prochaska and K. W. Bannister and S. Bhandari and C. K. Day and A. T. Deller and M. Glowacki and A. C. Gordon and K. E. Heintz and L. Marnoch and S. D. Ryder and D. R. Scott and R. M. Shannon and N. Tejos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.00819},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
21 pages, 19 figures, 6 tables, accepted by MNRAS, updated Table 5 and Figure 5