RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Tuesday, 14 September 2021, 11:00-12:00; ZOOM


Seo-Won Chang

"Joint RSAA+CGA Seminar: Preparation for the advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O4 Observing Run: SkyMapper Optical Follow-up of Gravitational Wave Triggers"

The third LIGO/Virgo observational campaign was very fruitful observations from a gravitational wave (GW) standpoint. But from the point of view of other multi-messenger observers, we have no plausible electromagnetic (EM) counterparts associated with the merger of compact binaries. SkyMapper is a good example of how CGA’s joint efforts work in practice and why it is important to overcome challenges before the O4 run. In this talk, as an important use-case of our robotic facility, we describe our follow-up strategy and current tools that can maximize success on the upcoming race from early kilonova discovery to rapid EM follow-up of GW events out to around 200 Mpc distance. To better reflect lessons learned from the O3 run, we present the analysis on the real SkyMapper data for the second binary neutron star merger GW190425 (known in Australia as ANZAC Day event). We will close with an outlook to future work and the O4 run.