A Deep CFHT Optical Search for a Counterpart to the Possible Neutron Star–Black Hole Merger GW190814

Vieira, Nicholas; Ruan, John J.; Haggard, Daryl; Drout, M. R.; Nynka, Melania; Boyce, Hope; Spekkens, Kristine; Safi‐Harb, Samar; Carlberg, R. G.; Fernández, Rodrigo; Piro, Anthony L.; Afsariardchi, Niloufar; Moon, Dae‐Sik

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab917d

Cited by 59 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…In part this is due to the deep observations that were capable of identifying transients sources fainter than 22 mag. In addition to the transients identified here through our searches, additional counterparts have been found by other groups (Andreoni et al 2020;Gomez et al 2019a;Dobie et al 2019;Vieira et al 2020). In total approximately 75 unique optical transients were identified.…”

Section: Ruling Out Identified Transients As Counterpartssupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Finally, during the revision of this manuscript a preprint was circulated by Vieira et al (2020), describing the wide-field optical search by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). The search reaches limits comparable to ours, despite covering a lower total localisation probability.…”

Section: Comparison To Other Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relatively small localisation region led to a world-wide follow-up effort with optical and NIR telescopes (e.g. Gomez et al 2019a;Andreoni et al 2020;Dobie et al 2019;Watson et al 2020;Antier et al 2020;Vieira et al 2020). The ENGRAVE collaboration activated its search programmes to try to discover, or set limits on, an EM counterpart to S190814bv.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Observational constraints on the optical and near-infrared emission from the neutron star–black hole binary merger candidate S190814bv

Ackley

Amati²,

Barbieri

et al. 2020

A&A

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Context. Gravitational wave (GW) astronomy has rapidly reached maturity, becoming a fundamental observing window for modern astrophysics. The coalescences of a few tens of black hole (BH) binaries have been detected, while the number of events possibly including a neutron star (NS) is still limited to a few. On 2019 August 14, the LIGO and Virgo interferometers detected a high-significance event labelled S190814bv. A preliminary analysis of the GW data suggests that the event was likely due to the merger of a compact binary system formed by a BH and a NS. Aims. In this paper, we present our extensive search campaign aimed at uncovering the potential optical and near infrared electromagnetic counterpart of S190814bv. We found no convincing electromagnetic counterpart in our data. We therefore use our non-detection to place limits on the properties of the putative outflows that could have been produced by the binary during and after the merger. Methods. Thanks to the three-detector observation of S190814bv, and given the characteristics of the signal, the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations delivered a relatively narrow localisation in low latency – a 50% (90%) credible area of 5 deg2 (23 deg2) – despite the relatively large distance of 267 ± 52 Mpc. ElectromagNetic counterparts of GRAvitational wave sources at the VEry Large Telescope collaboration members carried out an intensive multi-epoch, multi-instrument observational campaign to identify the possible optical and near infrared counterpart of the event. In addition, the ATLAS, GOTO, GRAWITA-VST, Pan-STARRS, and VINROUGE projects also carried out a search on this event. In this paper, we describe the combined observational campaign of these groups. Results. Our observations allow us to place limits on the presence of any counterpart and discuss the implications for the kilonova (KN), which was possibly generated by this NS–BH merger, and for the strategy of future searches. The typical depth of our wide-field observations, which cover most of the projected sky localisation probability (up to 99.8%, depending on the night and filter considered), is r ∼ 22 (resp. K ∼ 21) in the optical (resp. near infrared). We reach deeper limits in a subset of our galaxy-targeted observations, which cover a total ∼50% of the galaxy-mass-weighted localisation probability. Altogether, our observations allow us to exclude a KN with large ejecta mass M ≳ 0.1 M⊙ to a high (> 90%) confidence, and we can exclude much smaller masses in a sub-sample of our observations. This disfavours the tidal disruption of the neutron star during the merger. Conclusions. Despite the sensitive instruments involved in the campaign, given the distance of S190814bv, we could not reach sufficiently deep limits to constrain a KN comparable in luminosity to AT 2017gfo on a large fraction of the localisation probability. This suggests that future (likely common) events at a few hundred megaparsecs will be detected only by large facilities with both a high sensitivity and large field of view. Galaxy-targeted observations can reach the needed depth over a relevant portion of the localisation probability with a smaller investment of resources, but the number of galaxies to be targeted in order to get a fairly complete coverage is large, even in the case of a localisation as good as that of this event.

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Section: Ruling Out Identified Transients As Counterpartssupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Comparison To Other Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Observational constraints on the optical and near-infrared emission from the neutron star–black hole binary merger candidate S190814bv

Ackley

Amati²,

Barbieri

et al. 2020

A&A

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“…The third Advanced LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (LVK) observing run (O3, which ran in 2019-2020) yielded the solid detection of the second binary neutron star (NS-NS) merger (GW190425; Abbott et al 2020a), at least two neutron star-black hole (NS-BH) mergers (GW200105 and GW200115; Abbott et al 2021), and several other NS-NS or NS-BH candidates (The LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al 2021a). Despite much follow-up effort, no EM counterpart was identified during O3 in the optical (e.g., Andreoni et al 2019a;Coughlin et al 2019c;Goldstein et al 2019;Gomez et al 2019;Hosseinzadeh et al 2019;Lundquist et al 2019;Ackley et al 2020;Andreoni et al 2020;Antier et al 2020;Garcia et al 2020;Gompertz et al 2020;Kasliwal et al 2020;Vieira et al 2020;Anand et al 2021;Chang et al 2021;Kilpatrick et al 2021;Oates et al 2021;Becerra et al 2021), in the radio (Dobie et al 2019;Alexander et al 2021;Bhakta et al 2021), or during Xray/high-energy observations (Page et al 2020;Watson et al 2020) (see however Pozanenko et al 2020). The task was made particularly difficult by the coarse localization regions (median localization area of 4480 deg 2 ; Kasliwal et al 2020) and large distances (median distance of 267 Mpc; Kasliwal et al 2020) of NS-NS and NS-BH merger candidates (see also The LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al 2021b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Target of Opportunity Observations of Gravitational Wave Events with Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Andreoni,

Margutti,

Salafia

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The discovery of the electromagnetic counterpart to the binary neutron star merger GW170817 has opened the era of gravitational-wave multi-messenger astronomy. Rapid identification of the optical/infrared kilonova enabled a precise localization of the source, which paved the way to deep multiwavelength follow-up and its myriad of related science results. Fully exploiting this new territory of exploration requires the acquisition of electromagnetic data from samples of neutron star mergers and other gravitational wave sources. After GW170817, the frontier is now to map the diversity of kilonova properties and provide more stringent constraints on the Hubble constant, and enable new tests of fundamental physics. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) can play a key role in this field in the 2020s, when an improved network of gravitational-wave detectors is expected to reach a sensitivity that will enable the discovery of a high rate of merger events involving neutron stars (∼tens per year) out to distances of several hundred Mpc. We design comprehensive target-of-opportunity observing strategies for follow-up of gravitational-wave triggers that will make the Rubin Observatory the premier instrument for discovery and early characterization of neutron star and other compact object mergers, and yet unknown classes of gravitational wave events. * Gehrels Fellow † NASA Einstein Fellow vides numerous benefits to GW analysis, including: improved localization leading to host-galaxy identification (e.g., Coulter et al. 2017); determination of the source's distance and energy scales; characterization of the progenitor's local environment (e.g.,

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“…5 For compact binaries, the information released in Open Public Alerts (OPA) included 6 : the false-alarm rate (FAR) estimated by the search pipelines, the inferred sky position and distance of the source (Singer & Price 2016;Singer et al 2016a), the probability of astrophysical origin with classification according to different mass regions (Kapadia et al 2020), and the probability of neutron star matter content (Foucart et al 2018;Chatterjee et al 2020). Rapid and public information release enabled every astronomer with access to telescopes or neutrino detectors to search for counterparts to the GW candidates (Andreoni et al 2019;Antier et al 2020;Coughlin 2020;Coughlin et al 2020;Graham et al 2020;Hussain et al 2020;Kasliwal et al 2020;Vieira et al 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

GWSkyNet: A Real-time Classifier for Public Gravitational-wave Candidates

Cabero

Mahabal

McIver

2020

ApJL

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The rapid release of accurate sky localization for gravitational-wave (GW) candidates is crucial for multimessenger observations. During the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, automated GW alerts were publicly released within minutes of detection. Subsequent inspection and analysis resulted in the eventual retraction of a fraction of the candidates. Updates could be delayed by up to several days, sometimes issued during or after exhaustive multi-messenger follow-up campaigns. We introduce GWSkyNet, a real-time framework to distinguish between astrophysical events and instrumental artifacts using only publicly available information from the LIGO-Virgo open public alerts. This framework consists of a non-sequential convolutional neural network involving sky maps and metadata. GWSkyNet achieves a prediction accuracy of 93.5% on a testing data set.

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A Deep CFHT Optical Search for a Counterpart to the Possible Neutron Star–Black Hole Merger GW190814

Cited by 59 publications

References 85 publications

Observational constraints on the optical and near-infrared emission from the neutron star–black hole binary merger candidate S190814bv

Observational constraints on the optical and near-infrared emission from the neutron star–black hole binary merger candidate S190814bv

Target of Opportunity Observations of Gravitational Wave Events with Vera C. Rubin Observatory

GWSkyNet: A Real-time Classifier for Public Gravitational-wave Candidates

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