FRB dark sirens: Measuring the Hubble constant with unlocalized fast radio bursts
Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) can be used to measure cosmological parameters by employing the Macquart relation. However, at present, only a small number of FRB events are localized to host galaxies with known redshifts. Inspired by the dark siren method in gravitational wave cosmology, we develop a Bayesian method to statistically measure the Hubble constant using unlocalized FRBs and galaxy catalog data, which makes it possible to constrain cosmological parameters from a large number of FRB data without known redshifts, meanwhile including the real galaxy information. We assume that the probability for a galaxy to host an FRB is proportional to the luminosity of this galaxy and use the results from the IllustrisTNG simulation as the priors of FRB host galaxy parameters. Ignoring some systematic errors, we obtain the first statistical H0 measurement only using twelve unlocalized FRB events combined with the big bang nucleosynthesis result, i.e., H0=80.4+24.1-19.4 km s-1 Mpc-1, (68\% highest-density interval). This method can also be refined to constrain other cosmological and FRB parameters. It is applicable to well-localized FRBs that still have several potential hosts.
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