English

Measurement of Hubble constant with stellar-mass binary black holes

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-11-22 v3

Abstract

The direct detections of gravitational waves (GW) from merging binary black holes (BBH) by aLIGO have brought us a new opportunity to utilize BBH for a measurement of the Hubble constant. In this paper, we point out that there exists a small number of BBH that gives significantly small sky localization volume so that a host galaxy is uniquely identified. Then a redshift of a BBH is obtained from a spectroscopic follow-up observation of the host galaxy. Using these redshift-identified BBH, we show that the Hubble constant is measured at a level of precision better than 1% with advanced detectors like aLIGO at design sensitivity. Since a GW observation is completely independent of other astrophysical means, this qualitatively new probe will help resolve a well-known value discrepancy problem on the Hubble constant from cosmological measurements and local measurements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.06060,
  title  = {Measurement of Hubble constant with stellar-mass binary black holes},
  author = {Atsushi Nishizawa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.06060},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures, accepted as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review D