Gravitational-wave astronomy requires population-informed parameter estimation

Uninformative priors are good because they’re uninformative, right? Not really. We argue they’re bad because they are uninformative, i.e. they leave out information. Now, that’s the best you can do if you don’t have that information, but if you do and decide to ignore it, then it becomes your fault. This is the case in our beloved GW astronomy. When we analyze a GW event, we do have some information on what it should look like because we’ve seen many other events. If we ignore that information, then it’s no surprise that the results can be crazy biased.

M. Mould, R. Tenorio, D. Gerosa.
arXiv:2604.15885 [gr-qc].