Lensing Effects on Gravitational Waves in a Clumpy Universe: Effects of Inhomogeneity on the Distance‐Redshift Relation

Abstract

The distance-redshift relation determined by means of gravitational waves in the clumpy universe is simulated numerically by taking into account the effects of gravitational lensing. It is assumed that all of the matter in the universe takes the form of randomly distributed point masses, each of which has the identical mass M L. Calculations are carried out in two extreme cases, k3GM L /c 2 and kTGM L /c 2 , where k denotes the wavelength of gravitational waves. In the first case, the distance-redshift relation for the fully homogeneous and isotropic universe is reproduced with a small distance dispersion, whereas in the second case, the distance dispersion is larger. This result suggests that we might obtain information about the typical mass of lens objects through the distance-redshift relation gleaned through observation of gravitational waves of various wavelengths. In this paper, we show how to set limitations on the mass M L through the observation of gravitational waves in the clumpy universe model described above.