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Published August 17, 2020 | Supplemental Material + Accepted Version + Published
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Measuring the Hubble constant with a sample of kilonovae

Abstract

Kilonovae produced by the coalescence of compact binaries with at least one neutron star are promising standard sirens for an independent measurement of the Hubble constant (H₀). Through their detection via follow-up of gravitational-wave (GW), short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) or optical surveys, a large sample of kilonovae (even without GW data) can be used for H₀ contraints. Here, we show measurement of H₀ using light curves associated with four sGRBs, assuming these are attributable to kilonovae, combined with GW170817. Including a systematic uncertainty on the models that is as large as the statistical ones, we find H₀=73.8^(+6.3)_(−5.8) km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹ and H₀=71.2^(+3.2)_(−3.1) km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹ for two different kilonova models that are consistent with the local and inverse-distance ladder measurements. For a given model, this measurement is about a factor of 2-3 more precise than the standard-siren measurement for GW170817 using only GWs.

Additional Information

© 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 31 January 2020; Accepted29 July 2020; Published 17 August 2020. M.W.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant number PHY-2010970. T.D. acknowledges support by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 749145, BNSmergers. N.C. and J.H. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation with grant number PHY-1806990. S.A. is supported by the CNES Postdoctoral Fellowship at Laboratoire Astroparticle et Cosmologie. N.C., M.C., and J.H. gratefully acknowledge support from the Observatoire Côte d'Azur, including hospitality for M.C. and J.H. in Summer 2019. The UCSC team is supported in part by NASA grant NNG17PX03C, NSF grant AST-1911206, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by fellowships from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to R.J.F. D.A.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant DGE1339067. Data availability: Upon request, the first author will provide posterior samples from these analyses. All photometric data used in this analysis are publically available from a variety of sources, specified in Methods Section 6 and compiled in https://github.com/mcoughlin/gwemlightcurves/tree/master/lightcurves. Spectral energy distributions for the grid used here will be made available at https://github.com/mbulla/kilonova_models. Code availability: The light-curve fitting and Hubble Constant code is available at: https://github.com/mcoughlin/gwemlightcurves. Author Contributions: M.W.C. conducted the light-curve analysis and was the primary author of the manuscript. M.W.C., S.A., T.D., R.J.F., J.H., M.B., N.C., D.C., L.I., and N.A. contributed to the data analysis procedures and edits to the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

Attached Files

Published - s41467-020-17998-5.pdf

Accepted Version - 2008.07420.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2020_17998_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
December 8, 2023