Search for Gravitational Waves Associated with Gamma-Ray Bursts Detected by Fermi and Swift during the LIGO–Virgo Run O3b

Abstract

We search for gravitational-wave signals associated with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected by the Fermi and Swift satellites during the second half of the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2019 November 1 15:00 UTC–2020 March 27 17:00 UTC). We conduct two independent searches: a generic gravitational-wave transients search to analyze 86 GRBs and an analysis to target binary mergers with at least one neutron star as short GRB progenitors for 17 events. We find no significant evidence for gravitational-wave signals associated with any of these GRBs. A weighted binomial test of the combined results finds no evidence for subthreshold gravitational-wave signals associated with this GRB ensemble either. We use several source types and signal morphologies during the searches, resulting in lower bounds on the estimated distance to each GRB. Finally, we constrain the population of low-luminosity short GRBs using results from the first to the third observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. The resulting population is in accordance with the local binary neutron star merger rate.

Extreme Variability in a Long-duration Gamma-Ray Burst Associated with a Kilonova

“…If a subclass of lGRBs corresponds to compact binary mergers as their source then this will have implications for the gravitational-wave signal search strategy of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK). Currently LVK search for gravitational waves in coincidence with GRBs detected by the Fermi and Swift satellites (Abbott et al 2021(Abbott et al , 2022; see also Wang et al 2022). In these searches, GRBs are classified as short if T 90 < 2 s, long if T 90 > 4 s, or ambiguous for all the other cases.…”

“…During observing run O3, times coincident with 49 GRBs were examined targeting compact binary merger signals. The times coincident with 191 GRBs were examined with the generic search pipeline (Abbott et al 2021(Abbott et al , 2022. If only the GRB T 90 is considered, as is presently the case for these LVK analyses, then including GRBs such as GRB 211211A will require a significant broadening of the "ambiguous" class, considerably increasing the number of GRBs that will have to be analyzed with the compact binary merger pipeline.…”

Prospects for detecting and localizing short-duration transient gravitational waves from glitching neutron stars without electromagnetic counterparts

“…Isolated NSs are also an interesting astrophysical source for transient GWs in the detectable range of current generation GW detectors. For example, searches have been conducted for magnetars that can be strong emitters of transient GWs and short bursts of γ rays [8,9], but no detection has been made yet.…”

The Structure of Gamma Ray Burst Jets

“…Most of the topics presented here are fields of active research and are evolving at a fast pace, especially in the latest years after GW170817. The upcoming science runs of the ground-based gravitational wave detector network, currently comprising the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO, [295]), Advanced Virgo [296] and KAGRA [297], will likely soon yield at least one new binary neutron star and/or black hole-neutron star merger event (e.g., [298][299][300][301][302][303][304][305][306][307]), hopefully with an associated jet: this will provide new unique insights on the structure of short GRB jets, on the properties of off-axis jet emission in general, and on the incidence of jets, which can be used to constrain the progenitor population (e.g., [308]). With new 'golden' events such as GW170817, direct information on the jet structure can be extracted, e.g., through the methodologies discussed at the end of Section 4.2, provided that a detailed, high-cadence, multi-wavelength dataset will be collected.…”