Published December 22, 2017
| Submitted + Supplemental Material
Journal Article
Open
Illuminating Gravitational Waves: A Concordant Picture of Photons from a Neutron Star Merger
Abstract
Merging neutron stars offer an exquisite laboratory for simultaneously studying strong-field gravity and matter in extreme environments. We establish the physical association of an electromagnetic counterpart (EM170817) to gravitational waves (GW170817) detected from merging neutron stars. By synthesizing a panchromatic dataset, we demonstrate that merging neutron stars are a long-sought production site forging heavy elements by r-process nucleosynthesis. The weak gamma-rays seen in EM170817 are dissimilar to classical short gamma-ray bursts with ultra-relativistic jets. Instead, we suggest that breakout of a wide-angle, mildly-relativistic cocoon engulfing the jet elegantly explains the low-luminosity gamma-rays, the high-luminosity ultraviolet-optical-infrared and the delayed radio/x-ray emission. We posit that all merging neutron stars may lead to a wide-angle cocoon breakout; sometimes accompanied by a successful jet and sometimes a choked jet.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 14 September 2017; accepted 5 October 2017; Published online 16 October 2017. We thank Iva Kostadinova for seamlessly coordinating the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) program and Britt Griswold for beautiful graphic arts. We thank Patricia Whitelock for facilitating IRSF observations. We thank Scott Barthelmy for setting up an LVC GCN system that facilitated quick, citable communication between astronomers and maximized the science return. We thank Sterl Phinney, Shri Kulkarni and Lars Bildsten for valuable comments. We thank the staff of Gemini Observatory, in particular the director Laura Ferrarese for rapidly approving our Director's Discretionary Time request, and our program contact scientists Mischa Shirmer, Hwihyun Kim, Karleyne Silva, Morten Andersen, and Ricardo Salinas for supporting and executing observations. We especially grateful to Gemini for postponing scheduled maintenance on the FLAMINGOS-2 instrument in order to obtain as much data as possible on this extraordinary event. This work was supported by the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation under PIRE Grant No 1545949. GROWTH is a collaborative project among California Institute of Technology (USA), University of Maryland College Park (USA), University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (USA), Texas Tech University (USA), San Diego State University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), National Central University (Taiwan), Indian Institute of Astrophysics (India), Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (India), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), The Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University (Sweden), Humboldt University (Germany), Liverpool John Moores University (UK). Full facility and funding acknowledgements are provided in the supplementary materials. The photometric data we used are tabulated in table S1. All of our raw observations are available in observatory archives; URLs and project numbers are provided in the supplementary materials. The PLUTO software used for our simulations is available at http://plutocode.ph.unito.it/; our simulation input and output files are provided as data S1 and S2. Gemini observatory data were obtained primarily under programs GS-2017B-DD-1 and GS-2017B-DD-6 (PI L. P. Singer) and is available at https://archive.gemini.edu. CTIO1.3m data obtained under program NOAO 2017B-0160 (PI B. Cobb) is available at http://archive.noao.edu/. Hubble Space Telescope data obtained under program HST-GO-15436 (PI M. M. Kasliwal) is available at https://archive.stsci.edu/. Keck Observatory data (PI G. Hallinan) is available at https://koa.ipac.caltech.edu/. VLT data is available at http://archive.eso.org/. The data of GALEX presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G and by other grants and contracts. PS1: The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) have been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, and Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE). 2MASS: This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. WISE: This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. PYRAF is a product of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA for NASA. Some observations were obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina), and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil). A.H. acknowledges support by the I-Core Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation. T.M. acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council through grant FT150100099. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020. The Australia Telescope Compact Array is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is funded by the Australian Government for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. D.L.K. is additionally supported by NSF grant AST-1412421. A.A.M. is funded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation in support of the Data Science Fellowship Program. P.C.Y., C.C.N. and W.H.I. thank the support from grant MOST104-2923-M-008-004-MY5 and MOST106-2112-M-008-007. A.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation CAREER award 1455090, "CAREER: Radio and gravitational-wave emission from the largest explosions since the Big Bang". T.P. acknowledges the support of Advanced ERC grant TReX and the Templeton Foundation. B.E.C, thanks SMARTS 1.3-m Queue Manager Bryndis Cruz for prompt scheduling of the SMARTS observations. Basic research in radio astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is funded by 6.1 Base funding. Construction and installation of VLITE was supported by NRL Sustainment Restoration and Maintenance funding. K.P.M's research is supported by the Oxford Centre for Astrophysical Surveys which is funded through the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation. J.S. and A.G. are grateful for support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Together with S.R they are also supported by the research environment grant "Gravitational Radiation and Electromagnetic Astrophysical Transients (GREAT)" funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) under Dnr 2016-06012. S.R. has also been supported by VR (grant number 2016- 036573), and by the Swedish National Space Board (107/16). E.O.O. is grateful for the support by grants from the Israel Science Foundation, Minerva, Israeli ministry of Science, the US Israel Binational Science Foundation, and the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation. We thank the staff of the GMRT that made these observations possible. The GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A.Y.Q.H. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1144469. J.E.J. acknowledges supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. DGE-1144469. S.G. acknowledges support from NSF Award PHY-1607585. G.C.A. and V.B. acknowledge the support of the Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology, India and the Indo-US Science and Technology Foundation for the GROWTH-India project. J.B. acknowledges support from the Einstein Fellowship grant PF7-180162. N.K., R.I. and Y.Y. acknowledge the support of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for the GROWTH project. CZTI is built by a TIFR-led consortium of institutes across India, including VSSC, ISAC, IUCAA, SAC and PRL. The Indian Space Research Organisation funded, managed and facilitated the project. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics in 3D (ASTRO 3D) through project number CE170100013. F.R. acknowledges support from the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award DE-SC0012160 "Scalable and Energy-Efficient Methods for Interactive Exploration of Scientific Data." E.N. and O.G. acknowledge the support of an ERC starting grant (GRB/SN) and an ISF grant (1277/13). P.E.N. acknowledges support from the DOE through DE-FOA-0001088, "Analytical Modeling for Extreme-Scale Computing Environments." This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.Attached Files
Submitted - 1710.05436.pdf
Supplemental Material - aap9455_Kasliwal_SM.pdf
Supplemental Material - aap9455_Kasliwal_SM_data_S1.zip
Supplemental Material - aap9455_Kasliwal_SM_data_S2.zip
Supplemental Material - aap9455_Kasliwal_SM_interactive_light_curve.zip
Supplemental Material - aap9455_Kasliwal_SM_movie_S1.mp4
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aap9455_Kasliwal_SM_data_S2.zip
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 81916
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170929-091827113
- AST-1545949
- NSF
- NAS5-26555
- NASA
- NNX09AF08G
- NASA
- NNX08AR22G
- NASA
- AST-1238877
- NSF
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- I-Core Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee
- Israel Science Foundation
- FT150100099
- Australian Research Council
- CE110001020
- Australian Research Council
- Australian Government
- AST-1412421
- NSF
- Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation
- 104-2923-M-008-004-MY5
- Ministry of Science and Technology (Taipei)
- 106-2112-M-008-007
- Ministry of Science and Technology (Taipei)
- AST-1455090
- NSF
- TReX
- European Research Council (ERC)
- John Templeton Foundation
- 6.1 Base funding
- Naval Research Laboratory
- Hintze Family Charitable Foundation
- Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
- Dnr 2016-06012
- Swedish Research Council
- 2016-036573
- Swedish Research Council
- 107/16
- Swedish National Space Board
- Israel Science Foundation
- MINERVA (Israel)
- Israeli Ministry of Science
- US-Israel Binational Science Foundation
- DGE-1144469
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- PHY-1607585
- NSF
- Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB)
- Department of Science and Technology (India)
- Indo-US Science and Technology Foundation
- PF7-180162
- NASA Einstein Fellowship
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
- Indian Space Research Organisation
- CE170100013
- Australian Research Council
- DE-SC0012160
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 1277/13
- Israel Science Foundation
- DE-FOA-0001088
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- Created
-
2017-09-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Astronomy Department