The mini-GWAC optical follow-up of the gravitational wave alerts: results from the O2 campaign and prospects for the upcoming O3 run
2019
The second (O2) observational campaign of
gravitational waves(GW) organized by the
LIGO/Virgo Collaborations have lead to several breakthroughs as the detection of
gravitationalsignals from mergers systems involving black holes or neutrons stars. During O2, 14
gravitational wavesalerts were sent to the astronomical community with
skyregions covering mostly over hundreds of
squares degrees. Among them, 6 have been confirmed as real events. Since 2013, a new set of ground-based
robotical telescopescalled GWAC (and its
pathfindermini-GWAC) has emerged to contribute to the various challenges of the multi-messenger and
time domain astronomy. The GWAC system is developed within the framework of the
ground-segmentsystem of the SVOM mission aiming to study the multi-wavelength transient
skyin the next decade. During O2, the mini-GWAC telescope network was fully operational. Due to their wide field of view and fast automatic follow-up, the mini-GWAC telescopes were well adapted to efficiently cover the
skylocalization area of the
gravitational waveevents. In this paper, we present the mini-GWAC pipeline we set up to answer to the GWalerts and we report our optical observations of 8
gravitational waveevents detected during the O2 run. So far, our observations provide the largest probability coverage of the GW
skylocalization area in a short latency for any optical facilities. We found tens of optical transient candidates in our images, but none of these could be securely correlated to any confirmed black hole - black hole merger events. Based on this first experience and the near future technical improvements of our network system, we will be more competitive to detect the optical counterparts from some
gravitational waveevents detected during the upcoming O3 run, especially those from binary neutron star mergers.
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