Event Details

Gravitational wave (GW) standard sirens offer a promising means of measuring absolute distances to merging compact-object binaries. If the GW sources have electromagnetic counterparts that permit the measurement of redshift, these sources can also be used to constrain cosmology, as pointed out by Schutz (1986). To date, however, only one GW source has had a detected EM counterpart, and it is possible that such counterparts may continue to be rare in the near future. I will describe how we can extract cosmological information from GW sources even if they do not have counterparts, and I will discuss applications like measuring the Hubble constant H0 and redshift-space distortions.