Heavy Black-Holes Also Matter in Standard Siren Cosmology

Abstract

With the release of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog GWTC-4.0 by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration, 218 candidate detections of gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) have been reported. This milestone represents a major advancement for GW cosmology, as many methods, particularly those employing the spectral siren approach, critically depend on the number of available sources. We investigate the impact of a novel parametric model describing the full population mass spectrum of CBCs on the estimation of the Hubble constant. This model is designed to test the impact of heavy black holes in GW cosmology. We perform a joint inference of cosmological and population parameters using 142 CBCs from GWTC-4.0 with a false alarm rate smaller than 0.25 per year, using both spectral and dark siren approaches. With spectral sirens, we estimate the Hubble constant to be $H_0 = 78.8^{+19.0}_{-15.3}\,{\rm km s^{-1} Mpc^{-1}}$ (68% CL), while the dark siren method yields $H_0 = 82.5^{+16.8}_{-14.3}\,{\rm km s^{-1} Mpc^{-1}}$ (68% CL). These results improve the uncertainty by approximately 30.4% and 36.2%, respectively. We show that this improvement is linked to the presence of a new mass scale in the binary black hole mass spectrum at $63.3^{+4.8}_{-4.8}\,M_{\odot}$, which provides additional constraints on the Hubble constant. Besides providing the tightest standard-siren constraints on $H_0$, this highlights the importance of a heavy-mass feature in the black hole spectrum.