Statistical Host Identification As a Test of Dark Energy

What is our current understanding of gravitational physics? How does gravity behave over cosmological distances? The EU-funded SHADE project will address these questions about the dark sector of the universe. To test gravity using hundreds of future detections of binary black holes at high redshifts, the project will develop a technique titled ‘Statistical Host Identification’ of gravitational wave sources. An approximate simulation that operates with generalised, model-independent gravitational laws will be constructed, in order to model distribution of gravitational wave events and their host galaxies. This tool also allows the use of information about gravity from non-linear scales of cosmological structure. Overall, the project will use these tools to obtain powerful new constraints on extended gravity models.