Localization of binary neutron star mergers with second and third generation gravitational-wave detectors

Abstract

The observation of gravitational wave signals from binary black hole and binary neutron star mergers has established the field of gravitational wave astronomy. It is expected that future networks of gravitational wave detectors will possess great potential in probing various aspects of astronomy. An important consideration for successive improvement of current detectors or establishment on new sites is knowledge of the minimum number of detectors required to perform precision astronomy. We attempt to answer this question by assessing the ability of future detector networks to detect and localize binary neutron stars mergers on the sky. Good localization ability is crucial for many of the scientific goals of gravitational wave astronomy, such as electromagnetic follow-up, measuring the properties of compact binaries throughout cosmic history, and cosmology. We find that although two detectors at improved sensitivity are sufficient to get a substantial increase in the number of observed signals, at least three detectors of comparable sensitivity are required to localize majority of the signals, typically to within around 10 deg 2 -adequate for follow-up with most wide field of view optical telescopes.

Localization of Compact Binary Sources with Second-generation Gravitational-wave Interferometer Networks

“…We also examine here the transition from a 5-fold, design sensitivity network with second-generation instruments to a network with a heterogeneous set of instruments where the H and L instruments are upgraded to the A+ design. We leave the investigation of upgraded versions of LIGO India, Virgo, and KAGRA to future studies, as the potential upgrade schedule is currently uncertain; see Vitale & Whittle (2018);Mills et al (2018) for investigations of the properties of events in the second-and third-generation of interferometers. For this comparison, we use the same set of events from the design sensitivity study.…”

“…Breaking down the improvement via 2-fold configurations, the overall improvement is not dominated by just contributions from the upgraded H and L. The increase in sensitivity improves both the SNR and the ability of the network to do timing (Fairhurst 2018). The HL configuration is the dominant detector pair by sensitivity, and thus will, in aggregate, contribute the most SNR when they are active.…”

“…In addition to analytical studies (Wen & Chen 2010;Schutz 2011;Fairhurst 2011b), end-to-end simulations performed in anticipation of the first two observing runs were done with BAYESTAR and LALInference (Singer et al 2014;Berry et al 2015;Farr et al 2016;Del Pozzo et al 2018). Other studies have addressed various facets of localizations with a 3-fold or larger network at design sensitivity (Nissanke et al 2013;Rodriguez et al 2014;Gaebel & Veitch 2017;Fairhurst 2018;Pankow et al 2018). In the next five years, it is expected that two additional large-scale interferometers will be operational (Abbott et al 2020b): the Japanese cryogenic interferometer KAGRA (K; Aso et al 2013), and LIGO-India (I; Iyer et al 2011).…”

Forecasting Gamma‐Ray Bursts Using Gravitational Waves

“…However, both versions will have comparable sensitivities to Advanced LIGO at low frequencies (see Figure 1 of ref. []). Therefore, they will not start accumulating significant SNR until Hz, thus offering us gains of a few minutes over in Table .…”

“…Both Tables and clearly show that ET will yield superb SNRs for sources out to 1 Gpc. With such high SNRs we expect that a future network consisting of ET and LIGO Voyager will be able to localize half the sources inside a radius of Mpc to within , but mostly after the merger. On the other hand, ET together with CE will localize of the BNSs within 200, 400 Mpc to 1 deg 2 , respectively .…”