J/MNRAS/493/3264 Gaia counterparts to GW events (Kostrzewa-Rutkowska+, 2020)
Electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events from Gaia.
Kostrzewa-Rutkowska Z., Jonker P.G., Hodgkin S.T., Eappachen D.,
Harrison D.L., Koposov S.E., Rixon G., Wyrzykowski L., Yoldas A.,
Breedt E., Delgado A., van Leeuwen M., Wevers T., Burgess P.W.,
De Angeli F., Evans D.W., Osborne P.J., Riello M.
<Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 493, 3264-3273 (2020)>
=2020MNRAS.493.3264K 2020MNRAS.493.3264K (SIMBAD/NED BibCode)
ADC_Keywords: Gravitational wave ; Transient ; Positional data ; Optical
Keywords: gravitational waves - transients - methods: observational - surveys
Abstract:
The recent discoveries of gravitational wave events and in one case
also its electromagnetic (EM) counterpart allow us to study the
Universe in a novel way. The increased sensitivity of the LIGO and
Virgo detectors has opened the possibility for regular detections of
EM transient events from mergers of stellar remnants. Gravitational
wave sources are expected to have sky localization up to a few hundred
square degrees, thus Gaia as an all-sky multi-epoch photometric survey
has the potential to be a good tool to search for the EM counterparts.
In this paper, we study the possibility of detecting EM counterparts
to gravitational wave sources using the Gaia Science Alerts system. We
develop an extension to current used algorithms to find transients and
test its capabilities in discovering candidate transients on a sample
of events from the observation periods O1 and O2 of LIGO and Virgo.
For the gravitational wave events from the current run O3, we expect
that about 16 (25) per cent should fall in sky regions observed by
Gaia 7 (10) d after gravitational wave. The new algorithm will provide
about 21 candidates per day from the whole sky.
Description:
We studied the possibility of detecting EM counterparts to GW events
by Gaia using a dedicated transient detection algorithm. We propose an
extension to current algorithms used by GSA to find transients and
tested its capabilities in discovering candidate transients. The main
concern is the level of false positives which has to be limited
through various filters (based on event time, sky localization map,
but also candidate transient neighbourhood). The candidate transients
for EM counterparts to the previous GW detections are also reported.
The search using the bespoke detector yielded 535 candidate transients
observed by Gaia within 7d from the GW events detected in the O1 and
O2 runs.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
tablea1.dat 82 535 Candidate transients from Gaia
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See also:
I/337 : Gaia DR1 (Gaia Collaboration, 2016)
I/345 : Gaia DR2 (Gaia Collaboration, 2018)
Byte-by-byte Description of file: tablea1.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 8 A8 --- Event Gravitational wave event
10- 19 F10.6 deg RAdeg Right ascension (J2000)
21- 30 F10.6 deg DEdeg Declination (J2000)
32- 45 F14.6 d JD Discovery date
47- 52 F6.3 mag Gmag Gaia G-band magnitude
54- 58 F5.3 mag e_Gmag Error on Gmag
60- 82 A23 --- Host Potential host of the GW event (1)
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Note (1): The potential hosts were identified by a cross-match using the GLADE
catalogue (Dalya et al. 2018MNRAS.479.2374D 2018MNRAS.479.2374D, Cat. VII/281), the SDSS
catalogue (Blanton et al. 2017AJ....154...28B 2017AJ....154...28B), and the SIMBAD data
base (Wenger et al. 2000A&AS..143....9W 2000A&AS..143....9W) within a search radius of
15 arcsec
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History:
From electronic version of the journal
(End) Ana Fiallos [CDS] 21-Apr-2023