학술논문
iPTF SEARCH FOR AN OPTICAL COUNTERPART TO GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE TRANSIENT GW150914
Document Type
article
Author
Kasliwal, MM; Cenko, SB; Singer, LP; Corsi, A; Cao, Y; Barlow, T; Bhalerao, V; Bellm, E; Cook, D; Duggan, GE; Ferretti, R; Frail, DA; Horesh, A; Kendrick, R; Kulkarni, SR; Lunnan, R; Palliyaguru, N; Laher, R; Masci, F; Manulis, I; Miller, AA; Nugent, PE; Perley, D; Prince, TA; Quimby, RM; Rana, J; Rebbapragada, U; Sesar, B; Singhal, A; Surace, J; Van Sistine, A
Source
The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 824(2)
Subject
Language
Abstract
The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) autonomously responded to and promptly tiled the error region of the first gravitational-wave event GW150914 to search for an optical counterpart. Only a small fraction of the total localized region was immediately visible in the northern night sky, due both to Sun-angle and elevation constraints. Here, we report on the transient candidates identified and rapid follow-up undertaken to determine the nature of each candidate. Even in the small area imaged of 126 deg2, after extensive filtering, eight candidates were deemed worthy of additional follow-up. Within two hours, all eight were spectroscopically classified by the Keck II telescope. Curiously, even though such events are rare, one of our candidates was a superluminous supernova. We obtained radio data with the Jansky Very Large Array and X-ray follow-up with the Swift satellite for this transient. None of our candidates appear to be associated with the gravitational-wave trigger, which is unsurprising given that GW150914 came from the merger of two stellar-mass black holes. This end-to-end discovery and follow-up campaign bodes well for future searches in this post-detection era of gravitational waves.