First Demonstration of Early Warning Gravitational-wave Alerts

Full description

Gravitational-wave observations became commonplace in Advanced LIGO-Virgo's recently concluded third observing run. 56 nonretracted candidates were identified and publicly announced in near real time. Gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers, however, remain of special interest since they can be precursors to high-energy astrophysical phenomena like γ-ray bursts and kilonovae. While late-time electromagnetic emissions provide important information about the astrophysical processes within, the prompt emission along with gravitational waves uniquely reveals the extreme matter and gravity during—and in the seconds following—merger. Rapid communication of source location and properties from the gravitational-wave data is crucial to facilitate multimessenger follow-up of such sources. This is especially enabled if the partner facilities are forewarned via an early warning (pre-merger) alert. Here we describe the commissioning and performance of such a low-latency infrastructure within LIGO-Virgo. We present results from an end-to-end mock data challenge that detects binary neutron star mergers and alerts partner facilities before merger. We set expectations for these alerts in future observing runs.

Notes

External Organisations
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; California Institute of Technology; Université Paris-Saclay; Pennsylvania State University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Kenyon College; University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; University of Wisconsin Madison; The University of Tokyo; University of Toronto; Swinburne University of Technology; ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery; New York University; Montclair State University; University of Urbino; National Institute for Nuclear Physics; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Associated Persons
Stuart Anderson (Creator)Ryan Magee (Creator); Deep Chatterjee (Creator); Leo P. Singer (Creator); Surabhi Sachdev (Creator); Geoffrey Mo (Creator); Patrick R. Brady (Creator); Patrick Brockill (Creator); Kipp Cannon (Creator); Tito Dal Canton (Creator); Patrick Clearwater (Creator); Alex Codoreanu (Creator); Marco Drago (Creator); Patrick Godwin (Creator); Shaon Ghosh (Creator); Giuseppe Greco (Creator); Chad Hanna (Creator); Shasvath J. Kapadia (Creator)