ITC Seminar - Maya Fishbach (Chicago)

Cosmology with Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens

Abstract:  Merging compact objects are useful cosmological probes because their distance is directly encoded in their gravitational waveform. Combining this distance with an independent redshift measurement, one can measure the expansion history of the universe. In this talk, I will discuss different ways of combining the gravitational-wave distance measurement with a redshift: using an electromagnetic counterpart, a catalog of galaxies, or by measuring the redshifted mass distribution. I will summarize what these methods have already taught us about the Hubble constant, as well as what we can expect to learn from future gravitational-wave detections.