English

Potential Gravitational-wave and Gamma-ray Multi-messenger Candidate from Oct. 30, 2015

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2019-06-11 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We present a search for binary neutron star mergers that produced gravitational-waves during the first observing run of Advanced LIGO and gamma-ray emission seen by either \textit{Swift}-BAT or Fermi-GBM, similar to GW170817 and GRB 170817A. We introduce a new method using a combined ranking statistic to detect sources that do not produce significant gravitational-wave or gamma-ray burst candidates individually. The current version of this search can increase by 70% the detections of joint gravitational-wave and gamma-ray signals. We find one possible candidate observed by LIGO and Fermi-GBM, 1-OGC 151030, at a false alarm rate of 1 in 13 years. If astrophysical, this candidate would correspond to a merger at 18787+99187^{+99}_{-87}\,Mpc with source-frame chirp mass of 1.300.03+0.02M1.30^{+0.02}_{-0.03}\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot}. If we assume the viewing angle must be <30<30^{\circ} to be observed by \textit{Fermi}-GBM, our estimate of the distance would become 22478+88224^{+88}_{-78}\,Mpc. By comparing the rate of binary neutron star mergers to our search-estimated rate of false alarms, we estimate that there is a 1 in 4 chance this candidate is astrophysical in origin.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.09496,
  title  = {Potential Gravitational-wave and Gamma-ray Multi-messenger Candidate from Oct. 30, 2015},
  author = {Alexander H. Nitz and Alex B. Nielsen and Collin D. Capano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.09496},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures, updated to match published version, supplementary data at https://github.com/gwastro/o1-gwgrb