Arizona: Best of Both Worlds: Asteroids & Massive Mergers

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Arizona: Best of Both Worlds: Asteroids & Massive Mergers

Post by bystander » Sat Aug 17, 2019 3:00 pm

Best of Both Worlds: Asteroids and Massive Mergers
University of Arizona, Tucson | 2019 Aug 14

University of Arizona researchers are using the Catalina Sky Survey’s near-Earth object telescopes to locate the optical counterparts to gravitational waves triggered by massive mergers.

The race is on. Since the construction of technology able to detect the ripples in space and time triggered by collisions from massive objects in the universe, astronomers around the world have been searching for the bursts of light that could accompany such collisions, which are thought to be the sources of rare heavy elements.

The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory has partnered with the Catalina Sky Survey, which searches for near-Earth asteroids from atop Mount Lemmon, in an effort dubbed Searches after Gravitational Waves Using ARizona Observatories, or SAGUARO, to find optical counterparts to massive mergers. ...

The ongoing campaign began in April, and in that month alone, the team was notified of three massive collisions. Because it is difficult to tell the precise location from which the gravitational wave originated, locating optical counterparts can be difficult.

According to Lundquist, two strategies are being employed. In the first, teams with small telescopes target galaxies that are at the right approximate distance, according to the gravitational wave signal. Catalina Sky Survey, on the other hand, utilizes a 60-inch telescope with a wide field of view to scan large swaths of sky in 30 minutes.

Three alerts, on April 9, 25 and 26, triggered the team’s software to search nearly 20,000 objects. Machine learning software then trimmed down the total number of potential optical counterparts to five. ...

Searches after Gravitational Waves Using ARizona Observatories (SAGUARO): System
Overview and First Results from Advanced LIGO/Virgo's Third Observing Run
~ M. J. Lundquist et al
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