LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S250304cb
GCN Circular 39691
Maia Williams (PSU), Samuele Ronchini (PSU), Gayathri Raman (PSU), James DeLaunay (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Aaron Tohuvavohu (Caltech) report:
Swift/BAT was observing 97.58% of the GW localization probability (bayestar.multiorder.fits) at merger time. A fraction 43.22% 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:1612.02395], and spectral shape from GRB170817A [arXiv:1710.05446]) and for four time bins. In units of 10^-7 erg/s/cm^2:
| time_bin (s) | soft | normal | hard | GRB170817 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.256 | 7.85 | 5.54 | 5.01 | 6.09 |
| 1.024 | 3.99 | 2.82 | 2.55 | 3.09 |
| 4.096 | 2.12 | 1.50 | 1.36 | 1.65 |
| 16.384 | 1.29 | 0.91 | 0.82 | 1.00 |
The upper limits as function of sky position are plotted here, alongside the GW localization: [https://zenodo.org/records/15008852]
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/]
GCN Circular 39582
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, and the KAGRA Collaboration report:
We identified the compact binary merger candidate S250304cb during real-time processing of data from LIGO Hanford Observatory (H1), LIGO Livingston Observatory (L1), and Virgo Observatory (V1) at 2025-03-04 06:22:45.568 UTC (GPS time: 1425104583.568). The candidate was found by the GstLAL [1] and MBTA [2] analysis pipelines.
S250304cb is an event of interest because its false alarm rate, as estimated by the online analysis, is 5.6e-08 Hz, or about one in 6 months. The event's properties can be found at this URL:
https://gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/S250304cb
The classification of the GW signal, in order of descending probability, is BBH (96%), Terrestrial (4%), NSBH (<1%), or BNS (<1%).
Assuming the candidate is astrophysical in origin, the probability that the lighter compact object is consistent with a neutron star mass (HasNS) is <1%. [3] Using the masses and spins inferred from the signal, the probability of matter outside the final compact object (HasRemnant) is <1%. [3] 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 2%.
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 [4], distributed via GCN notice about 28 seconds after the candidate event time.
* bayestar.multiorder.fits,2, an initial localization generated by BAYESTAR [4], 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 1569 deg2. Marginalized over the whole sky, the a posteriori luminosity distance estimate is 1768 +/- 541 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/.
[1] Tsukada et al. PRD 108, 043004 (2023) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.108.043004 and Ewing et al. (2023) arXiv:2305.05625
[2] Aubin et al. CQG 38, 095004 (2021) doi:10.1088/1361-6382/abe913
[3] Chatterjee et al. ApJ 896, 54 (2020) doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab8dbe
[4] Singer & Price PRD 93, 024013 (2016) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.93.024013