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GCN Circular 35211

Subject
LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S231129ac: Identification of a GW compact binary merger candidate
Date
2023-11-29T09:48:01Z (a year ago)
From
Pablo García Abia at CIEMAT <pablo.garcia@ciemat.es>
Via
Web form
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, and the KAGRA Collaboration report:

We identified the compact binary merger candidate S231129ac during real-time processing of data from LIGO Hanford Observatory (H1) and LIGO Livingston Observatory (L1) at 2023-11-29 08:17:45.643 UTC (GPS time: 1385281083.643). The candidate was found by the CWB [1], GstLAL [2], and SPIIR [3] analysis pipelines.

S231129ac is an event of interest because its false alarm rate, as estimated by the online analysis, is 1.8e-08 Hz, or about one in 1 year, 9 months. The event's properties can be found at this URL:

https://gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/S231129ac

The classification of the GW signal, in order of descending probability, is BBH (99%), Terrestrial (1%), NSBH (<1%), or BNS (<1%).

There was a high rate of noise transients (glitches) in the LIGO Hanford detector which may affect the parameters or the significance of the candidate.

Assuming the candidate is astrophysical in origin, the probability that the lighter compact object is consistent with a neutron star mass (HasNS) is <1%. [4] Using the masses and spins inferred from the signal, the probability of matter outside the final compact object (HasRemnant) is <1%. [4] Both HasNS and HasRemnant consider the support of several neutron star equations of state. The probability that either of the binary components lies between 3 and 5 solar masses (HasMassgap) is <1%.

Two sky maps are available at this time and can be retrieved from the GraceDB event page:
 * bayestar.multiorder.fits,1, an initial localization generated by BAYESTAR [5], distributed via GCN notice about a minute after the candidate event time.
 * bayestar.multiorder.fits,2, an initial localization generated by BAYESTAR [5], distributed via GCN notice about 5 minutes after the candidate event time.

The preferred sky map at this time is bayestar.multiorder.fits,2. For the bayestar.multiorder.fits,2 sky map, the 90% credible region is 3175 deg2. Marginalized over the whole sky, the a posteriori luminosity distance estimate is 5958 +/- 1935 Mpc (a posteriori mean +/- standard deviation).

For further information about analysis methodology and the contents of this alert, refer to the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Public Alerts User Guide https://emfollow.docs.ligo.org/userguide/.

 [1] Klimenko et al. PRD 93, 042004 (2016)
 [2] Tsukada et al. PRD 108, 043004 (2023) and Ewing et al. arXiv:2305.05625 (2023)
 [3] Chu et al. PRD 105, 024023 (2022)
 [4] Chatterjee et al. ApJ 896, 54 (2020)
 [5] Singer & Price PRD 93, 024013 (2016)

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