Optical Follow-up of Gravitational-wave Events with Las Cumbres Observatory
- Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9530 (United States)
- Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978 (Israel)
- Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of California, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-5270 (United States)
- Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720-8169 (United States)
- Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027 (United States)
- Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904 (Israel)
- CIERA and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 (United States)
We present an implementation of the Gehrels et al. galaxy-targeted strategy for gravitational-wave (GW) follow-up using the Las Cumbres Observatory global network of telescopes. We use the Galaxy List for the Advanced Detector Era (GLADE) galaxy catalog, which we show is complete (with respect to a Schechter function) out to ∼300 Mpc for galaxies brighter than the median Schechter function galaxy luminosity. We use a prioritization algorithm to select the galaxies with the highest chance of containing the counterpart given their luminosity, their position, and their distance relative to a GW localization, and in which we are most likely to detect a counterpart given its expected brightness compared to the limiting magnitude of our telescopes. This algorithm can be easily adapted to any expected transient parameters and telescopes. We implemented this strategy during the second Advanced Detector Observing Run (O2) and followed the black hole merger GW170814 and the neutron star merger GW170817. For the latter, we identified an optical kilonova/macronova counterpart thanks to our algorithm selecting the correct host galaxy fifth in its ranked list among the 182 galaxies we identified in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO)/Virgo localization. This also allowed us to obtain some of the earliest observations of the first optical transient ever triggered by a GW detection (as presented in a companion paper).
- OSTI ID:
- 22654362
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 848, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 2041-8205
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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