Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2016
Volume 61, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2016; Salt Lake City, Utah
Session R14: Optical and Gamma Ray Followups of Gravity Wave Triggers |
Hide Abstracts |
Sponsoring Units: GGR DAP Chair: Leo Singer, NASA Room: 251AB |
Monday, April 18, 2016 10:45AM - 10:57AM |
R14.00001: The DECam Gravitational Waves Follow-up Program Marcelle Soares-Santos We report on the status of a program to search for the optical counterparts of gravitational wave sources using the Dark Energy camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-m telescope at CTIO. This program is a joint effort between the community and the Dark Energy Survey (DES). DECam has a 3 sq-deg field of view, and typically reaches a limiting magnitude of i,z = 23 for 90 sec exposure times. As such it is one of the most efficient and rapid instruments for deep searches of the large gravitational wave error regions. In this talk we describe our observing strategies and on-going efforts based on the first Advanced LIGO science run. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 10:57AM - 11:09AM |
R14.00002: Identifying Electromagnetic Counterparts to Gravitational Wave Triggers With DECam. Philip Cowperthwaite Identifying the electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave (GW) event is one of the great observational challenges in modern astronomy. We report on our work to overcome this challenge by investigating the theoretical and practical issues associated with optical follow-up of a GW event. This includes a systematic study of the potential contaminant population and their impact on counterpart detectability in simulated observations. Additionally, we utilize data taken with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-m telescope at CTIO. These data serve as a mock follow-up to a GW event and assist in the characterization of contamination not captured in simulations. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 11:09AM - 11:21AM |
R14.00003: Gravitational wave triggered searches for failed supernovae James Annis Stellar core collapses occur to all stars of sufficiently high mass and often result in supernovae. A small fraction of supergiant stars, however, are thought to collapse directly into black holes without producing supernovae. A survey of such "failed" supernovae would require monitoring millions of supergiants for several years. That is very challenging even for current surveys. With the start of the Advanced LIGO science run, we investigate the possibility of detecting failed supernovae by looking for missing supergiants associated with gravitational wave triggers. We use the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). Our project is a joint effort between the community and the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. In this talk we report on our ongoing efforts and discuss prospects for future searches. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
R14.00004: Fermi GBM Counterparts to LIGO Gravitational-Wave Candidates Judith Racusin, Lindy Blackburn, Michael Briggs, Eric Burns, Jordan Camp, Tito Dal Canton, Nelson Christensen, Valerie Connaughton, Adam Goldstein, Peter Jenke, Tyson Littenberg, Peter Shawhan, Leo Singer, John Veitch, Colleen Wilson-Hodge, Binbin Zhang As advanced LIGO begins operations, we eagerly anticipate the detection of gravitational waves (GW) in coincidence with a gamma-ray signal from the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM). The most likely source is a short Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) arising from the merger of two neutron stars. With its broad sky coverage, GBM triggers and localizes more short GRBs than other active space missions, ~45 each year, with an estimate of <1-5 within the LIGO detection horizon. Combining GBM and LIGO localization uncertainty regions may provide a smaller region for GW host searches. A joint GBM-LIGO detection increases the confidence in the GW detection and helps characterize the parameters of the merger. Offline searches for weak GRBs that fail to trigger onboard Fermi indicate that additional short GRBs can be detected in the GBM data. I will discuss joint searches to detect and localize GW candidates, and explore how the non-detection in the GBM data of a signal consistent with GW candidates in the LIGO data can affect follow-up strategies for counterpart searches by other observers. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
R14.00005: Results of optical follow-up observations of advanced LIGO triggers from O1 in the southern hemisphere. Martin Beroiz, Carlos Colazo, Mario Diaz, Mariano Dominguez, Diego Garcia Lambas, Sebastian Gurovich, Marcelo Lares, Lucas Macri, Tania Penuela, Horacio Rodriguez, Bruno Sanchez We report on observations related to the follow-up of LIGO VIRGO collaboration triggers released to participating astronomers during the First Observation Run 1 (O1) from September 18, 2015 to January 12, 2016, performed by the TOROS collaboration. The Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South (TOROS) collaboration operated telescopes located in two different sites in Argentina: one at the Estaci\'{o}n Astrof\'{\i}sica Bosque Alegre in Cordoba, and the other one located in Cord\'{o}n Mac\'{o}n, Salta. In this communication we describe the main characteristics of the campaign sustained during O1 and the plans for continuing observation in the future. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
R14.00006: The background rate of false positives: Combining simulations of gravitational wave events with an unsupervised algorithm for transient identification in crowded image-subtracted data. Kendall Ackley, Stephen Eikenberry, Sergey Klimenko We are now entering the era of multimessenger gravitational wave (GW) astronomy with the completion of the first observing run of Advanced LIGO. Multiwavelength electromagnetic (EM) emission is expected to accompany gravitational radiation from compact object binary mergers, such as those between neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes, where Advanced LIGO is most sensitive to their detection. Attempting to perform EM follow-up over the 10-100s deg$^2$ error regions will be faced with many challenges, including the identification and removal of $ \mathcal{O}(10^5)$ false positive transients that appear as a commotion of background events and as image artifacts in crowded image-subtracted fields. We present an update to our automated unsupervised algorithm including how our pipeline uses the existing coherent WaveBurst pipeline in an attempt to develop optimized EM follow-up schema. Our end-to-end pipeline combines simulated GW events with actual observational data from a number of ground-based optical observatories, including PTF, ROTSE, and DECam. Our performance is reported both in terms of the number of coincident false positives as well as the efficiency of recovery. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 11:57AM - 12:09PM |
R14.00007: ABSTRACT WITHDRAWN |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700