We derive limits on any electromagnetic counterpart to the compact binary merger S190814bv, whose parameters are consistent with the merger of a black hole and a neutron star. We present observations with the new wide-field optical imager DDOTI and also consider Swift/BAT observations reported by Palmer et al. (2019). We show that Swift/BAT would have detected a counterpart with similar properties to a typical on-axis short GRB at the 98 per cent confidence level, whereas our DDOTI observations only rule out such a counterpart at the 27 per cent confidence level. Neither have sufficient sensitivity to rule out an off-axis counterpart like GW 170817. We compare the efficiency of Swift/BAT and DDOTI for future observations, and show that DDOTI is likely to be about twice as efficient as Swift/BAT for off-axis events up to about 100 Mpc.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2001.05436,
title = {Limits on the Electromagnetic Counterpart to S190814bv},
author = {Alan M. Watson and Nathaniel R. Butler and William H. Lee and Rosa L. Becerra and Margarita Pereyra and Fernando Angeles and Alejandro Farah and Liliana Figueroa and Diego González-Buitrago and Fernando Quirós and Jaime Ruíz-Díaz-Soto and Carlos Tejada de Vargas and Silvio J. Tinoco and Tanner Wolfram},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.05436},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted by MNRAS. 6 pages. Fixed typos and references