GALAXY-TARGETED ROBOTIC TELESCOPE FOLLOW-UP OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE EVENTS

Abstract

Robotic telescopes and networks are well equipped to respond rapidly to transient events. However, the era of multi-messenger astronomy presents new challenges in the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events. Specifically, these sources can be distant, faint, poorly localised, and quickly decaying. Effciently searching for counterparts requires coverage of large localisation regions and/or targeted observations. This paper presents a galaxy retrieval and ranking algorithm for targeted observations, and a public web interface to retrieve ranked galaxy lists following a gravitational wave event. The website is publicly available at https://gwtool.watchertelescope.ie/.