Growing Pains: Understanding the Impact of Likelihood Uncertainty on Hierarchical Bayesian Inference for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

Understand

Observations of gravitational waves emitted by merging compact binaries have provided tantalising hints about stellar astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics.

• However, the physical parameters describing the systems, (mass, spin, distance) used to extract these inferences about the Universe are subject to large uncertainties.
• The most widely-used method of performing these analyses requires performing many Monte Carlo integrals to marginalise over the uncertainty in the properties of the individual binaries and the survey selection bias.
• These Monte Carlo integrals are subject to fundamental statistical uncertainties.