Title

Implementation and Testing of the First Prompt Search for Electromagnetic Counterparts to Gravitational Wave Transients

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Duncan Brown, Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
J. Abadie, California Institute of Technology
Stefan Ballmer, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Collin Capano, Syracuse UniversityFollow
P. Couvares, Syracuse University

Document Type

Article

Date

9-15-2011

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

Aims. A transient astrophysical event observed in both gravitational wave (GW) and electromagnetic (EM) channels would yield rich scientific rewards. A first program initiating EM follow-ups to possible transient GW events has been developed and exercised by the LIGO and Virgo community in association with several partners. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the methods used to promptly identify and localize GW event candidates and to request images of targeted sky locations. Methods. During two observing periods (Dec 17 2009 to Jan 8 2010 and Sep 2 to Oct 20 2010), a low-latency analysis pipeline was used to identify GW event candidates and to reconstruct maps of possible sky locations. A catalog of nearby galaxies and Milky Way globular clusters was used to select the most promising sky positions to be imaged, and this directional information was delivered to EM observatories with time lags of about thirty minutes. A Monte Carlo simulation has been used to evaluate the low-latency GW pipeline's ability to reconstruct source positions correctly. Results. For signals near the detection threshold, our low-latency algorithms often localized simulated GW burst signals to tens of square degrees, while neutron star/neutron star inspirals and neutron star/black hole inspirals were localized to a few hundred square degrees. Localization precision improves for moderately stronger signals. The correct sky location of signals well above threshold and originating from nearby galaxies may be observed with ~50% or better probability with a few pointings of wide-field telescopes.

Additional Information

15 pages More information at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.3498

First author and SU authors listed, for additional authors see the article.

Recommended Citation

Brown, Duncan; Abadie, J.; Ballmer, Stefan; Capano, Collin; and Couvares, P., "Implementation and Testing of the First Prompt Search for Electromagnetic Counterparts to Gravitational Wave Transients" (2011). Physics - All Scholarship. 236.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/236

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.