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Free keywords:
Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE, Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM
Abstract:
Estimates of the source sky location for gravitational wave signals are
likely span areas ranging up to hundreds of square degrees or more, making it
very challenging for most telescopes to search for counterpart signals in the
electromagnetic spectrum. To boost the chance of successfully observing such
counterparts, we have developed an algorithm which optimizes the number of
observing fields and their corresponding time allocations by maximizing the
detection probability. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we optimize
follow-up observations targeting kilonovae using telescopes including CTIO-Dark
Energy Camera, Subaru-HyperSuprimeCam, Pan-STARRS and Palomar Transient
Factory. We consider three simulated gravitational wave events with 90%
credible error regions spanning areas from ~30 deg^2 to ~300 deg^2. Assuming a
source at 200 Mpc, we demonstrate that to obtain a maximum detection
probability, there is an optimized number of fields for any particular event
that a telescope should observe. To inform future telescope design studies, we
present the maximum detection probability and corresponding number of observing
fields for a combination of limiting magnitudes and fields-of-view over a range
of parameters. We show that for large gravitational wave error regions,
telescope sensitivity rather than field-of-view, is the dominating factor in
maximizing the detection probability.
