Cross-correlating dark sirens and galaxies: constraints on $H_0$ from GWTC-3 of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA

Abstract

We apply the cross-correlation technique to infer the Hubble constant ($H_0$) of the Universe using gravitational wave (GW) sources without electromagnetic counterparts (dark sirens) from the third GW Transient Catalog (GWTC-3) and the photometric galaxy surveys 2MPZ and WISE-SuperCOSMOS, and combine these with the bright siren measurement of $H_0$ from GW170817. The posterior on $H_0$ with only dark sirens is uninformative due to the small number of well-localised GW sources. Using the eight well-localized dark sirens and the binary neutron star GW170817 with EM counterpart, we obtain a value of the Hubble constant $H_0= 75.4_{-6}^{+11}$ km/s/Mpc (median and 68.3$\%$ equal-tailed interval (ETI)) after marginalizing over the matter density and the GW bias parameters. This measurement is mostly driven by the bright siren measurement and any constraint from dark sirens is not statistically significant. In the future, with more well-localized GW events, the constraints on expansion history will improve.