LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S250912s
GCN Circular 41817
Subject
LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S250912s: 2 counterpart neutrino candidate events from an IceCube neutrino search
Date
2025-09-12T20:13:49Z (13 days ago)
From
Zsuzsa Marka at IceCube/Columbia University <zsuzsa@astro.columbia.edu>
Via
Web form
IceCube Collaboration (http://icecube.wisc.edu/) reports:
We have performed a search for track-like muon neutrino candidate events detected by IceCube consistent with the sky localization of the low-significance gravitational-wave candidate event S250912s in a time range of 1000 seconds centered on the alert event time (2025-09-12 18:13:09 UTC to 2025-09-12 18:29:49 UTC) [1,2]. During this time period, IceCube was collecting good quality data. A single hypothesis test was conducted using a Bayesian approach to quantify the joint GW + neutrino event significance, which assumes a binary merger scenario and accounts for known astrophysical priors, such as GW source distance, in the statistical significance estimation [3].
Two track-like events were found in spatial and temporal coincidence with the gravitational-wave candidate S250912s calculated from the map circulated in the S250912s-2-Preliminary notice. This represents an overall p-value of 0.00927 for the Bayesian search. The p-value measures the consistency of the observed track-like events with the known atmospheric backgrounds for this single map (not accounting for statistical trials from multiple GW events).
Further details are available at https://gcn.nasa.gov/missions/icecube and at https://roc.icecube.wisc.edu/public/LvkNuTrackSearch.
Properties of the coincident event are shown below:
dt(s) RA(deg) Dec(deg) Angular uncertainty(deg) p-value(Bayesian)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-276.12 284.52 44.13 16.11 0.0115
19.10 275.72 24.65 1.44 0.0530
where:
dt = Time of track event minus time of GW trigger (sec)
Angular uncertainty = Angular uncertainty of track event: the radius of a circle
representing 90% CL containment by area.
p-value = the individual p-value for the specific track event from this search.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at the geographic South Pole, Antarctica. The IceCube realtime alert point of contact can be reached at roc@icecube.wisc.edu
[1] M. G. Aartsen et al 2020 ApJL 898 L10
[2] Abbasi et al. Astrophys.J. 944 (2023) 1, 80
[3] I. Bartos et al. 2019 Phys. Rev. D 100, 083017