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GCN Circular 34128

Subject
LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S230627c: Upper limits from Swift/BAT-GUANO
Date
2023-07-01T03:37:08Z (a year ago)
From
Samuele Ronchini at PSU <sjs8171@psu.edu>
Gayathri Raman (PSU),  Samuele Ronchini (PSU), Aaron Tohuvavohu (U Toronto), James DeLaunay (U Alabama), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC) report:

Swift/BAT was observing 99.2% of the GW localization probability (Bilby.multiorder.fits,0) at merger time.
The entirety of the GW 90% credible region is contained inside the coded FoV.

The LVK notice, distributed in near real-time, triggered the Swift Mission Operations Center operated Gamma-ray Urgent Archiver for Novel Opportunities (GUANO; Tohuvavohu et al. 2020, ApJ, 900, 1).

Upon trigger by this notice, GUANO sent a command to the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) to save 200 seconds of BAT event-mode data from [-50,+150] seconds around the time of the burst. All the requested event mode data was delivered to the ground.

Using the NITRATES analysis (DeLaunay + Tohuvavohu 2022, ApJ, 941, 169), we searched for emission on 8 timescales from 0.128s to 16.384s in the interval [-20,+20] seconds around the merger time. We find no evidence for a signal, and derive the following upper limits.

We quote the 5-sigma flux upper limits in the 15-350 keV band, weighted over the GW localization, for four spectral templates (soft, normal, and hard GRB-like templates described in [arXiv:1612.02395], and spectral shape from GRB170817A [arXiv:1710.05446]) and for four time bins. 
In units of 10^-8 erg/s/cm^2:

Bin duration (s) |	hard		normal		soft		GRB 170817A
----------------------------------------------------	
0.256			 |	7.0		7.7		4.9		8.3
1.024			 |	3.6		4.0		2.5		4.2
4.096			 |	1.9		2.2		1.4		2.3
16.384		 	 |	1.2		1.3		0.8		1.4

For a median distance of 291 Mpc, we derive luminosity upper limits (in units of 10^47 erg/s) as follows:

Bin duration (s) |	hard		normal		soft		GRB 170817A 
-----------------------------------------------------	
0.256			 |	7.1		7.8		5.0		8.4
1.024			 |	3.6		4.0		2.5		4.3
4.096			 |	2.0		2.2		1.4		2.3
16.384			 |	1.2		1.3		0.8		1.4

The upper limits as function of sky position are plotted here, alongside the GW localization:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8102958

The corresponding fits file can be found here:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8102951

GUANO is a fully autonomous, extremely low latency, spacecraft
commanding pipeline designed for targeted recovery of BAT event mode
data around the times of compelling astrophysical events to enable
more sensitive GRB searches.

A live reporting of Swift/BAT event data recovered by GUANO can be
found at: https://www.swift.psu.edu/guano/
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