Unbiased Cosmic Opacity Constraints from Standard Sirens and Candles

Abstract: The observation of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) plays an essential role in probing the expansion history of the universe. But the possible presence of cosmic opacity can degrade the quality of SNe Ia. The gravitational-wave (GW) standard sirens, produced by the coalescence of double neutron stars and black hole--neutron star binaries, provide an independent way to measure the distances of GW sources, which are not affected by cosmic opacity. In this paper, we first propose that combining the GW observations of third-generation GW detectors with SN Ia data in similar redshift ranges offers a novel and model-independent method to constrain cosmic opacity. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we find that one can constrain the cosmic opacity parameter $\kappa$ with an accuracy of $\sigma_{\kappa}\sim0.046$ by comparing the distances from 100 simulated GW events and 1048 current Pantheon SNe Ia. The uncertainty of $\kappa$ can be further reduced to $\sim0.026$ if 800 GW events are considered. We also demonstrate that combining 2000 simulated SNe Ia and 1000 simulated GW events could result in much severer constraints on the transparent universe, for which $\kappa=0.0000\pm0.0044$. Compared to previous opacity constraints involving distances from other cosmic probes, our method using GW standard sirens and SN Ia standard candles at least achieves competitive results.