Rapid localization of gravitational wave hosts with FIGARO

Abstract

The copious scientific literature produced after the detection of GW170817 electromagnetic counterpart demonstrated the importance of a prompt and accurate localization of the gravitational wave within the co-moving volume. In this letter, we present FIGARO, a ready to use and publicly available software that relies on Bayesian non-parametrics. FIGARO is designed to run in parallel with parameter estimation algorithms to provide updated three-dimensional volume localization information. Differently from any existing algorithms, the analytical nature of the FIGARO reconstruction allows a ranking of the entries of galaxy catalogues by their probability of being the host of a gravitational wave event, hence providing an additional tool for a prompt electromagnetic follow up of gravitational waves. We illustrate the features of FIGARO on binary black holes as well as on GW170817. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of FIGARO by producing so-called pp-plots and we present a method based on information entropy to assess when, during the parameter estimation run, it is reasonable to begin releasing skymaps.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (17)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
• Gravitational Waves and Gamma-rays from a Binary Neutron Star Merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A
• Advanced LIGO
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• An Ordinary Short Gamma-Ray Burst with Extraordinary Implications: Fermi-GBM Detection of GRB 170817A
• A gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant
• Swope Supernova Survey 2017a (SSS17a), the Optical Counterpart to a Gravitational Wave Source
• Spectroscopic identification of r-process nucleosynthesis in a double neutron star merger
• Robust parameter estimation for compact binaries with ground-based gravitational-wave observations using the LALInference software library
• Light Curves of the Neutron Star Merger GW170817/SSS17a: Implications for R-Process Nucleosynthesis
• The MBTA Pipeline for Detecting Compact Binary Coalescences in the Third LIGO-Virgo Observing Run
• GLADE+: An Extended Galaxy Catalogue for Multimessenger Searches with Advanced Gravitational-wave Detectors
• Kilonova Detectability with Wide-Field Instruments
• Mass and star formation rate of the host galaxies of compact binary mergers across cosmic time
• (H)DPGMM: A Hierarchy of Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Models for the inference of the black hole mass function

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• Evidence for the evolution of black hole mass function with redshift
• Bayesian inference of $W$-boson mass
• Enhancing gravitational-wave host localization with SKYFAST: rapid volume and inclination angle reconstruction
• Non-parametric identification of single-lined binary candidates in young clusters using single-epoch spectroscopy