Submitting Campus
Prescott
Department
Physics and Astronomy
Document Type
Article
Publication/Presentation Date
11-2-2017
Abstract/Description
The detection of GW170817 (Abbott et al. 2017a) in both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves heralds the age of gravitational-wave multi-messenger astronomy. On 17 August 2017 the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) (LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al. 2015) and Virgo (Acernese et al. 2015) detectors observed GW170817, a strong signal from the merger of a binary neutron-star system. Less than 2 seconds after the merger, a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) was detected within a region of the sky consistent with the LIGO-Virgo-derived location of the gravitational-wave source (Abbott et al. 2017b; Goldstein et al. 2017; Savchenko et al. 2017). This sky region was subsequently observed by optical astronomy facilities (Abbott et al. 2017c), resulting in the identification of an optical transient signal within ∼ 10 arcsec of the galaxy NGC 4993 (Coulter et al. 2017; Soares-Santos et al. 2017; Valenti et al. 2017; Arcavi et al. 2017; Tanvir et al. 2017; Lipunov et al. 2017). These multi-messenger observations allow us to use GW170817 as a standard siren (Schutz 1986; Holz & Hughes 2005; Dalal et al. 2006; Nissanke et al. 2010, 2013), the gravitational-wave analog of an astronomical standard candle, to measure the Hubble constant. This quantity, which represents the local expansion rate of the Universe, sets the overall scale of the Universe and is of fundamental importance to cosmology. Our measurement combines the distance to the source inferred purely from the gravitational-wave signal with the recession velocity inferred from measurements of the redshift using electromagnetic data. This approach does not require any form of cosmic “distance ladder” (Freedman et al. 2001); the gravitational-wave (GW) analysis can be used to estimate the luminosity distance out to cosmological scales directly, without the use of intermediate astronomical distance measurements. We determine the Hubble constant to be 70.0+12.0 −8.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 (maximum a posteriori and 68% credible interval). This is consistent with existing measurements (Planck Collaboration et al. 2016; Riess et al. 2016), while being completely independent of them. Additional standard-siren measurements from future gravitational-wave sources will provide precision constraints of this important cosmological parameter.
Publication Title
Nature
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24471
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Scholarly Commons Citation
Abbott, B. P., AultONeal, K., Gaudio, S., Gill, K., Gretarrson, E. M., Hughey, B., Muratore, M., Pratt, J. W., Schwalde, S. G., Staats, K., Szczepańczyk, M. J., Zanolin, M., & al., e. (2017). A Gravitational-Wave Standard Siren Measurement of the Hubble Constant. Nature, 551(7678). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24471
