Cosmography from well-localized Fast Radio Bursts

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration pulses occurring at cosmological distances that have emerged as prominent cosmological probes due to their dispersion measure (DM) evolution with redshift. In this work, we use cosmography, a model-independent approach to describe the evolution of the universe, to introduce the cosmographic expansion of the DM-z relation. By fitting two different models for the intergalactic medium and host contributions to a sample of 23 well-localized FRBs, we estimate the kinematic parameters $q_0=-0.59 \substack{+0.20 \\ -0.17}$, $j_0=1.08 \substack{+0.62 \\ -0.56}$, $s_0=-2.1\pm7.0$, and $H_0=69.4\pm4.7$ achieving a precision of $6\%$ and $7\%$ for the Hubble constant depending on the models used for contributions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this approach can be used as an alternative and complementary cosmological-model independent method to revisit the long-standing "Missing Baryons" problem in astrophysics by estimating that $82\%$ of the baryonic content of the universe resides in the intergalactic medium, within $7\%$ and $8\%$ precision, according to the contribution models considered here. Our findings highlight the potential of FRBs as a valuable tool in cosmological research and underscore the importance of ongoing efforts to improve our understanding of these enigmatic events.