Speaker
Description
Compact object binaries merge at cosmological distances and their emitted gravitational-wave (GW) signals are understood from first principles. These GWs propagate through the Universe, unimpeded by intervening matter except for through the effects of gravitational lensing. Furthermore, these signals carry information about both the luminosity distance and redshift to their sources. These properties make GWs from compact binary mergers clean probes of both the Universe's expansion history and of gravitational lensing. In this talk, I will discuss how the mass distribution of binary black holes can be used to extract this information from the gravitational-wave dataset, even without theoretical predictions for the mass distribution's morphology.
