An empirical limit on the kilonova rate from the DLT40 one day cadence Supernova Survey

Abstract

Binary neutron star mergers are important to understand stellar evolution, the chemical enrichment of the universe via the r-process, the physics of short gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves and pulsars. The rates at which these coalescences happen is uncertain, but it can be constrained in different ways. One of those is to search for the optical transients produced at the moment of the merging, called a kilonova, in ongoing SN searches. However, until now, only theoretical models for kilonovae light curve were available to estimate their rates. The recent kilonova discovery AT~2017gfo/DLT17ck gives us the opportunity to constrain the rate of kilonovae using the light curve of a real event. We constrain the rate of binary neutron star mergers using the DLT40 Supernova search, and the native AT~2017gfo/DLT17ck light curve obtained with the same telescope and software system. Excluding AT~2017gfo/DLT17ck due to visibility issues, which was only discovered thanks to the aLIGO/aVirgo trigger, no other similar transients detected during 13 months of daily cadence observations of $\sim$ 2200 nearby ($<$40 Mpc) galaxies. We find that the rate of BNS mergers is lower than 0.47 - 0.55 kilonovae per 100 years per $10^{10}$ $L_{B_{\odot }}$ (depending on the adopted extinction distribution). In volume, this translates to $<0.99\times 10^{-4}{}_{-0.15}^{+0.19},\mathrm{Mp}{\mathrm{c}}^{-3}\mathrm{y}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}$(SNe Ia-like extinction distribution), consistent with previous BNS coalescence rates. Based on our rate limit, and the sensitivity of aLIGO/aVirgo during O2, it is very unlikely that kilonova events are lurking in old pointed galaxy SN search datasets.

3 figures, 2 tables

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Simulations of early kilonova emission from neutron star mergers
• The early discovery of SN 2017ahn: signatures of persistent interaction in a fast declining Type II supernova
• Constraining the Kilonova Rate with Zwicky Transient Facility Searches Independent of Gravitational Wave and Short Gamma-ray Burst Triggers
• Opacity of the highly ionized lanthanides and the effect on the early kilonova
• Linking the rates of neutron star binaries and short gamma-ray bursts
• The Tsinghua University-Ma Huateng Telescopes for Survey: Overview and Performance of the System
• Optical follow-up of gravitational wave events during the second advanced LIGO/VIRGO observing run with the DLT40 Survey
• Optimizing Serendipitous Detections of Kilonovae: Cadence and Filter Selection
• Supernova 2018cuf: A Type IIP supernova with a slow fall from plateau
• A Systematic Exploration of Kilonova Candidates from Neutron Star Mergers During the Third Gravitational Wave Observing Run
• Skynet's New Observing Mode: The Campaign Manager
• Optimized localization for gravitational-waves from merging binaries