2022MNRAS.514.1315B

The detection rate of electromagnetic (EM) and gravitational wave (GW) transients is growing exponentially. As the accuracy of the transient rates will significantly improve over the coming decades, so will our understanding of their evolution through cosmic history. To this end, we present predicted rates for EM and GW transients over the age of the universe using Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) results combined with four cosmic star formation histories (SFHs). These include a widely used empirical SFH of Madau & Dickinson and those from three cosmological simulations: MilliMillennium, EAGLE, and IllustrisTNG. We find that the choice of SFH changes our predictions: transients with short delay times are most affected by the star formation rate and change up to a factor of 2, while long delay time events tend to depend on the metallicity evolution of star formation and can change the predicted rate up to an order of magnitude. Importantly, we find that the cosmological simulations have very different metallicity evolution that cannot be reproduced by the widely used metallicity model of Langer & Norman, which impacts the binary black hole merger, stripped-envelope supernovae, and LGRBs in the local Universe most acutely. We recommend against using simple prescriptions for the metallicity evolution of the universe when predicting the rates of events that can have long delay times and that are sensitive to metallicity evolution.