Cosmological Constraints with Standard Sirens: Tackling Galaxy Catalog Incompleteness in Current Gravitational Wave Analysis

Gravitational waves (GWs) provide independent distance measurements when used as standard sirens, but require additional redshift information in order to operate as cosmological probes; this type of information can be obtained from real galaxy catalogs via statistical association with potential hosts. The limitations of such catalogs in different sky regions, however, must be properly accounted for to ensure robust and unbiased results. This work focuses on the development of the necessary updates to the Bayesian framework in the CHIMERA pipeline to correctly model the incompleteness of a real galaxy catalog (GLADE+). The developed pipeline, together with galaxy luminosity weighting, are tested on a selection of events taken from the GWTC-3 catalog: two significant GW events are used to produce statistical inferences for the Hubble constant (H0), and a sample of 42 Binary Black Hole events is analyzed through a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation: this allows for a joint estimation of cosmological and astrophysical parameters. The Thesis highlights the need to account for galaxy catalog incompleteness in standard siren analyses and demonstrates the potential of the updated CHIMERA pipeline to perform cosmological analyses on real data, especially in anticipation of upcoming GW data from the LVK detector network.