THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC FOLLOW-UP WITH ADVANCED LIGO AND VIRGO

By L. Singer, L. Price, B. Farr, A. Urban, C. Pankow, S. Vitale, J. Veitch, W. Farr, Chad Hanna, K. Cannon and 6 more. 2014

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We anticipate the first direct detections of gravitational waves (GWs) with Advanced LIGO and Virgo later this decade. Though this groundbreaking technical achievement will be its own reward, a still greater prize could be observations of compact binary mergers in both gravitational and electromagnetic channels simultaneously. During Advanced LIGO and Virgo's first two years of operation, 2015 through 2016, we expect the global GW detector array to improve in sensitivity and livetime and expand from two to three detectors. We model the detection rate and the sky localization accuracy for binary neutron star (BNS) mergers across this transition. We have analyzed a large, astrophysically motivated source population using real-time detection and sky localization codes and higher-latency parameter estimation codes that have been expressly built for operation in the Advanced LIGO/Virgo era. We show that for most BNS events, the rapid sky localization, available about a minute after a detection, is as accurate as the full parameter estimation. We demonstrate that Advanced Virgo will play an important role in sky localization, even though it is anticipated to come online with only one-third as much sensitivity as the Advanced LIGO detectors. We find that the median 90% confidence region shrinks from ∼500 deg2 in 2015 to ∼200 deg2 in 2016. A few distinct scenarios for the first LIGO/Virgo detections emerge from our simulations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f780a5197e6c92ea17561491e3036c7ea4e8a04f

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Citations in the corpus

BPASS predictions for binary black hole mergers (2016, background): “LIGO in its current configuration (two detectors in the United States), can localise events to a region of order ∼500- 1000 deg2, with this region typically distributed in an arc with multiple high probability regions rather than a single field (Essick et al. 2015; Singer et al. 2014).”
Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, methodology): “The posterior distribution on these parameters often assumes a broken ring shape misaligned with the equatorial coordinate system (Singer et al. 2014; Berry et al. 2015), making sampling difficult.”
Impact of ejecta morphology and composition on the electromagnetic signatures of neutron star mergers (2017, background): “…electromagnetic counterparts would provide crucial information to localize the astrophysical environments of gravitational wave signals (Metzger & Berger 2012; Nissanke et al. 2013; Piran et al. 2013; Singer et al. 2014; Chu et al. 2015; Ghosh et al. 2015; Bartos et al. 2016; Abbott et al. 2016a).”
Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2013, methodology): “ensitivity improves and waveforms must be computed down to lower frequencies. The quickest LALInference BNS follow-up is computed using waveforms that do not include the full eects of component spin [99, 31], sky locations can then be reported with latency of hours to a couple of days. Parameter est”
The local nanohertz gravitational-wave landscape from supermassive black hole binaries (2017, background): “The authors are grateful for open source scientific tools for Python (Jones et al. 2001–; The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; van der Walt et al. 2011; Barrett et al. 2005; Górski et al. 2005; Perez & Granger 2007) and L. Singer’s open source plot.py (Singer et al. 2014).”
GLADE: A galaxy catalogue for multimessenger searches in the advanced gravitational-wave detector era (2018, background): “Because of this, the optimization of EM follow-up observing strategies is an important task and a widely researched topic, discussed in details in e.g. Abadie et al. (2012a), Aasi et al. (2014a), Singer et al. (2014), Gehrels et al. (2016) and Coughlin et al. (2018).”