Speaker
Description
The Hubble parameter can be inferred from observations of gravitational waves generated by the collisions of compact objects, even those without optical counterparts. Earlier techniques for doing so required each observed compact object collision to have its intrinsic parameters estimated using a Bayesian statistical analysis. That process is sufficiently computationally costly that only a subset of the O(100) detections that have been made since 2015 have been analyzed in this way. The signals that are excluded are the weaker signals from more distant sources that are also those that have been most influenced by cosmological effects. In the coming decades, third generation detectors are expected to observe O(1000) compact object collisions every week, making the computational challenges significantly worse. I will describe work led by one of my graduate students to develop a novel approach to gravitational-wave cosmology that relies exclusively on information gathered by the signal detection algorithm itself, removing the need for any subsequent analyses and enabling all detections, even from the farthest sources, to be included.
