Special Seminar

Abstract: Gravitational wave cosmology with galaxy surveys

The synergy between gravitational wave (GW) experiments and large galaxy surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is most prominent in the standard siren method, which has already enabled several measurements of the Hubble Constant. A standard siren analysis was performed using the only GW event with an electromagnetic counterpart, GW170817, for the first time. We have later extended the analysis to compact object binary merger events without counterpart using DES and DESI galaxy catalogs, for which I will present the latest results. These measurements have the potential to shed light on the Hubble constant tension in the coming years. In the last part of the talk, I will present some interesting possibilities for the formation of the most massive binary black hole mergers detected so far which are related to galaxies’ central black holes, in particular those in dwarf galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei.

Bio: Antonella Palmese is an Einstein Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working mostly on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and multi-messenger observations of gravitational wave events. She got her PhD at University College London in 2018, where she worked on the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Before moving to Berkeley, Antonella was a postdoc at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, as well as an associate fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, at the University of Chicago. She currently is the co-chair of the DESI Transients and Low-z Cosmology Working Group and of the DES Galaxy Evolution and Quasars Working Group. She is interested in combining optical and gravitational wave data to measure cosmological parameters and understand the origin of gravitational wave sources.