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GCN Circular 36526

Subject
LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S240515m: Upper limits from Swift/BAT-GUANO
Date
2024-05-21T03:38:41Z (6 months ago)
From
Samuele Ronchini at PSU <sjs8171@psu.edu>
Via
Web form
Samuele Ronchini (PSU), Gayathri Raman (PSU), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC), Aaron Tohuvavohu (U Toronto), James DeLaunay (PSU)  report:

Swift/BAT was observing 92% of the GW localization probability (bayestar.multiorder.fits) at merger time. A fraction 33% of the GW localization posterior is contained inside the BAT 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:1612.02395Not found
 
 
], and spectral shape from GRB170817A [arXiv:1710.05446Not found
 
 
]) and for four time bins. 
In units of 10^-7 erg/s/cm^2:

time_bin (s) soft  normal hard  GRB170817
------------------------------------
0.256        7.25  5.67   5.31  6.02
1.024        3.72  2.92   2.73  3.10
4.096        2.05  1.61   1.51  1.71
16.384       1.33  1.04   0.97  1.10



The upper limits as function of sky position are plotted here, alongside the GW localization:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11225725Not found
 
 

The solid and dashed lines indicate the 90% and 50% GW contour levels, respectively. The corresponding fits file is also included.

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/