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Published April 1, 2021 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

First Demonstration of Early Warning Gravitational-wave Alerts

Abstract

Gravitational-wave observations became commonplace in Advanced LIGO-Virgo's recently concluded third observing run. 56 nonretracted candidates were identified and publicly announced in near real time. Gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers, however, remain of special interest since they can be precursors to high-energy astrophysical phenomena like γ-ray bursts and kilonovae. While late-time electromagnetic emissions provide important information about the astrophysical processes within, the prompt emission along with gravitational waves uniquely reveals the extreme matter and gravity during—and in the seconds following—merger. Rapid communication of source location and properties from the gravitational-wave data is crucial to facilitate multimessenger follow-up of such sources. This is especially enabled if the partner facilities are forewarned via an early warning (pre-merger) alert. Here we describe the commissioning and performance of such a low-latency infrastructure within LIGO-Virgo. We present results from an end-to-end mock data challenge that detects binary neutron star mergers and alerts partner facilities before merger. We set expectations for these alerts in future observing runs.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 February 25; accepted 2021 March 10; published 2021 April 6. We are grateful to B.S. Sathyaprakash for reviewing our manuscript and providing useful comments. We thank the LIGO Laboratory for use of its computing facility to make this work possible, and we gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) grants PHY-0757058 and PHY-0823459. C.H. gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grant OAC-1841480. D.C. acknowledges NSF grant No. PHY-1700765 and PHY-1912649, and is supported by the Illinois Survey Science Fellowship of the Center for Astrophysical Surveys (CAPS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. S.S. is supported by the Eberly Research Funds of Penn State, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. G.M. is supported by the NSF through award PHY-1764464 to the LIGO Laboratory. M.K., Q.C., F.P., L.W., A.P., A.S., and V.O. acknowledge the funding from Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery OzGrav under grant CE170100004. Facilities: LIGO - Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, EGO:Virgo. - Software: astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), numpy (Harris et al. 2020), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), iPython (Perez & Granger 2007), pandas (McKinney 2010), gwpy (Macleod et al. 2020), celery (Solem 2020).

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Published - Magee_2021_ApJL_910_L21.pdf

Submitted - 2102.04555.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023