Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 102, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.102.023531
Keywords
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Funding
- NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship - Space Telescope Science Institute [HST-HF2-51435.001-A, NAS5-26555]
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-FG02-13ER41958]
- Simons Foundation
- Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through the Kavli Foundation
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We consider gravitational wave (GW) sources with an associated electromagnetic (EM) counterpart and analyze the time delay between both signals in the presence of lensing. If GWs have wavelengths comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of astrophysical lenses, they must be treated with wave optics, whereas EM waves are typically well within the approximation of geometric optics. With concrete examples, we confirm that the GW signal never arrives before its EM counterpart, if both are emitted at the same time. However, during the inspiral of a binary, peaks of the GW waveform can arrive before their EM counterpart. We stress that this is only an apparent superluminality, since the GW waveform is both distorted and further delayed with respect to light. In any case, measuring the multimessenger time delay and correctly interpreting it has important implications for unveiling the distribution of lenses, testing the nature of gravity, and probing the cosmological expansion history.
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