Gravitational-wave cosmology

Summary

One of the most beautiful features of the gravitational wave (GW) signal emitted by coalescing binary systems is that it gives direct information to the luminosity distance to the source and the “redshifted masses” (this is a complicated way to say it has imprinted the impact of the expansion of the Universe).

This feature makes GWs ideal candidates to measure how the universe expands (but performing population Bayesian analyses is far from being an easy task…).

Also, GWs could be the only way to test gravity models that modify GR on cosmological scales, giving rise to an effect called “modified GW propagation”, that would not impact electromagnetic observables.

How do I contribute?

I have worked on different ways of extracting cosmological information from GW events (correlation with galaxy catalogs [1], lensed GW events [2], binary neutron star mass distribution [3]) and keep working on extending previous analyses including both correlation with galaxy catalog and mass distribution modeling [12], as well as challenging GR through the analysis of modified propagation, finding new ways to observe this phenomenon (more data is coming, the constraining power will soon raise!).