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      Delensing Gravitational Wave Standard Sirens with Shear and Flexion Maps

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          Abstract

          Supermassive black hole binary systems (SMBHB) are standard sirens -- the gravitational wave analogue of standard candles -- and if discovered by gravitational wave detectors, they could be used as precise distance indicators. Unfortunately, gravitational lensing will randomly magnify SMBHB signals, seriously degrading any distance measurements. Using a weak lensing map of the SMBHB line of sight, we can estimate its magnification and thereby remove some uncertainty in its distance, a procedure we call "delensing." We find that delensing is significantly improved when galaxy shears are combined with flexion measurements, which reduce small-scale noise in reconstructed magnification maps. Under a Gaussian approximation, we estimate that delensing with a 2D mosaic image from an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) could reduce distance errors by about 30-40% for a SMBHB at z=2. Including an additional wide shear map from a space survey telescope could reduce distance errors by 50%. Such improvement would make SMBHBs considerably more valuable as cosmological distance probes or as a fully independent check on existing probes.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          2009-07-21
          Article
          10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16317.x
          0907.3635
          6442f0b6-f115-4098-8909-032c75f8f9d0

          http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

          History
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          MNRAS, Volume 404, Issue 2, pp. 858-866, 2010
          9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to MNRAS
          astro-ph.CO

          Cosmology & Extragalactic astrophysics
          Cosmology & Extragalactic astrophysics

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