On 2017 August 17, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer detected gravitational waves emanating from a binary neutron star merger, GW170817. Nearly simultaneously, the Fermi and INTEGRAL telescopes detected a gamma-ray transient, GRB 170817A. 10.9 hours after the gravitational wave trigger, we discovered a transient and fading optical source, Swope Supernova Survey 2017a (SSS17a), coincident with GW170817. SSS17a is located in NGC 4993, an S0 galaxy at a distance of 40 megaparsecs. The precise location of GW170817 provides an opportunity to probe the nature of these cataclysmic events by combining electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observations.
@article{arxiv.1710.05452,
title = {Swope Supernova Survey 2017a (SSS17a), the Optical Counterpart to a Gravitational Wave Source},
author = {D. A. Coulter and R. J. Foley and C. D. Kilpatrick and M. R. Drout and A. L. Piro and B. J. Shappee and M. R. Siebert and J. D. Simon and N. Ulloa and D. Kasen and B. F. Madore and A. Murguia-Berthier and Y. -C. Pan and J. X. Prochaska and E. Ramirez-Ruiz and A. Rest and C. Rojas-Bravo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.05452},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
25 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables, published today in Science