Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2009-04-07
Astrophys.J.725:496-514,2010
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
19 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ; this version incorporates referee's comments and criticisms
Scientific paper
10.1088/0004-637X/725/1/496
Recent observations support the hypothesis that a large fraction of "short-hard" gamma-ray bursts (SHBs) are associated with compact binary inspiral. Since gravitational-wave (GW) measurements of well-localized inspiraling binaries can measure absolute source distances, simultaneous observation of a binary's GWs and SHB would allow us to independently determine both its luminosity distance and redshift. Such a "standard siren" (the GW analog of a standard candle) would provide an excellent probe of the relatively nearby universe's expansion, complementing other standard candles. In this paper, we examine binary measurement using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to build the probability distributions describing measured parameters. We assume that each SHB observation gives both sky position and the time of coalescence, and we take both binary neutron stars and black hole-neutron star coalescences as plausible SHB progenitors. We examine how well parameters particularly distance) can be measured from GW observations of SHBs by a range of ground-based detector networks. We find that earlier estimates overstate how well distances can be measured, even at fairly large signal-to-noise ratio. The fundamental limitation to determining distance proves to be a degeneracy between distance and source inclination. Overcoming this limitation requires that we either break this degeneracy, or measure enough sources to broadly sample the inclination distribution. (Abridged)
Dalal Neal
Holz Daniel E.
Hughes Scott A.
Nissanke Samaya
Sievers Jonathan Leroy
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