Gaia transient detection efficiency: hunting for nuclear transients

Abstract

We present a study of the detectability of transient events associated with galaxies for the Gaia European Space Agency astrometric mission. We simulated the on-board detections, and on-ground processing for a mock galaxy catalogue to establish the properties required for the discovery of transient events by Gaia, specifically tidal disruption events (TDEs) and supernovae (SNe). Transients may either be discovered by the on-board detection of a new source or by the brightening of a previously known source. We show that Gaia transients can be identified as new detections on-board for offsets from the host galaxy nucleus of 0.1--0.5,arcsec, depending on magnitude and scanning angle. The Gaia detection system shows no significant loss of SNe at close radial distances to the nucleus. We used the detection efficiencies to predict the number of transients events discovered by Gaia. For a limiting magnitude of 19, we expect around 1300 SNe per year: 65% SN Ia, 28% SN II and 7% SN Ibc, and ~20 TDEs per year.

17 pages, 10 figures, accepted by MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Gaia Photometric Science Alerts
• Distinguishing Tidal Disruption Events from Impostors
• The ANU WiFeS SuperNovA Program (AWSNAP)
• Hunting For Eclipses: High Speed Observations of Cataclysmic Variables
• Tidal disruption events from massive black hole binaries: predictions for ongoing and future surveys
• Gaia transients in galactic nuclei
• Lens parameters for Gaia18cbf -- a long gravitational microlensing event in the Galactic plane
• Using Gaussian Processes to detect AGN flares