We investigate the correlation between the distribution of galaxies and the predicted gravitational-wave background of astrophysical origin. We show that the large angular scale anisotropies of this background are dominated by nearby non-linear structure, which depends on the notoriously hard to model galaxy power spectrum at small scales. In contrast, we report that the cross-correlation of this signal with galaxy catalogues depends only on linear scales and can be used to constrain the average contribution to the gravitational-wave background as a function of time. Using mock data based on a simplified model, we explore the effects of galaxy bias, angular resolution and the matter abundance on these constraints. Our results suggest that, when combined with galaxy surveys, the gravitational-wave background can be a powerful probe for both gravitational-wave merger physics and cosmology.
@article{arxiv.1910.08353,
title = {Cross-correlation of the astrophysical gravitational-wave background with galaxy clustering},
author = {Guadalupe Cañas-Herrera and Omar Contigiani and Valeri Vardanyan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.08353},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
v2: 11 pages, 6 figures, noise model improved, discussion on source population extended, added more references