The impact of confusion noise on golden binary neutron-star events in next-generation gravitational-wave observatories

ORAL

Abstract

Next-generation terrestrial gravitational-wave observatories will detect hundreds of thousands of signals from compact binary coalescences every year. These signals can last for several hours in the detectors' sensitivity band and they will be affected by multiple unresolved sources contributing to a confusion-noise background in the data. Using an information-matrix formalism, we estimate the impact of the confusion noise power spectral density in broadening the parameter estimates of a GW170817-like event. If our estimate of the confusion noise power spectral density is neglected, we find that masses, spins, and distance are biased in about half of our simulations under realistic circumstances. The sky localization, while still precise, can be biased in up to 80% of our simulations, potentially posing a problem in follow-up searches for electromagnetic counterparts.

*L.R., A.A., R.C., M.Ç. and E.B. are supported by NSF Grants No. AST-2006538, PHY-2207502, PHY-090003 and PHY20043, and NASA Grants No. 19- ATP19-0051, 20-LPS20-0011 and 21-ATP21-0010. M.Ç. is also supported by Johns Hopkins University through the Rowland Research Fellowship. S.B. acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG, project MEMI number BE 6301/2-1. B.S.S. is supported by NSF Grants No. AST-2006384, PHY-2012083 and PHY-2207638. Part of E.B.'s and B.S.S.'s work was performed at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY1607611. This research was also supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958. This research project was conducted using computational resources at the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center (MARCC). The authors also acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. URL: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu.

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Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13452

Presenters

  • Luca Reali

    • Johns Hopkins University

Authors

  • Luca Reali

    • Johns Hopkins University

  • Andrea Antonelli

    • Johns Hopkins University

  • Roberto Cotesta

    • Johns Hopkins University

  • Ssohrab Borhanian

    • University Jena

  • Mesut Çaliskan

    • Johns Hopkins University

  • Emanuele Berti

    • Johns Hopkins University

  • Bangalore S Sathyaprakash

    • Pennsylvania State University