Herner, K;
Annis, J;
Berger, E;
Brout, D;
Butler, R;
Chen, H;
Cowperthwaite, P;
... Yanny, B; + view all
(2017)
Optical follow-up of gravitational wave triggers with DECam.
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
, 898
(3)
, Article 032050. 10.1088/1742-6596/898/3/032050.
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Abstract
Gravitational wave (GW) events have several possible progenitors, including black hole mergers, cosmic string cusps, supernovae, neutron star mergers, and black hole–neutron star mergers. A subset of GW events are expected to produce electromagnetic (EM) emission that, once detected, will provide complementary information about their astrophysical context. To that end, the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration has partnered with other teams to send GW candidate alerts so that searches for their EM counterparts can be pursued. One such partner is the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Gravitational Waves Program (DES-GW). Situated on the 4m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, DECam is an ideal instrument for optical followup observations of GW triggers in the southern sky. The DES-GW program performs subtraction of new search images with respect to preexisting overlapping images to select candidate sources. Due to the short decay timescale of the expected EM counterparts and the need to quickly eliminate survey areas with no counterpart candidates, it is critical to complete the initial analysis of each night's images within 24 hours. The computational challenges in achieving this goal include maintaining robust I/O pipelines during the processing, being able to quickly acquire template images of new sky regions outside of the typical DES observing regions, and being able to rapidly provision additional batch computing resources with little advance notice. We will discuss the search area determination, imaging pipeline, general data transfer strategy, and methods to quickly increase the available amount of batch computing. We will present results from the first season of observations from September 2015 to January 2016 and conclude by presenting improvements planned for the second observing season.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Optical follow-up of gravitational wave triggers with DECam |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1088/1742-6596/898/3/032050 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/898/3/032050 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10041720 |
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