Distance measures in gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology

Abstract

We present quantities which characterize the sensitivity of gravitational-wave observatories to sources at cosmological distances. In particular, we introduce and generalize the horizon, range, response, and reach distances. These quantities incorporate a number of important effects, including cosmologically well-defined distances and volumes, cosmological redshift, cosmological time dilation, and rate density evolution. In addition, these quantities incorporate unique aspects of gravitational wave detectors, such as the variable sky sensitivity of the detectors and the scaling of the sensitivity with inverse distance. An online calculator (https://users.rcc.uchicago.edu/~dholz/gwc/) and python notebook (https://github.com/hsinyuc/distancetool) to determine GW distances are available. We provide answers to the question: ‘How far can gravitational-wave detectors hear.