Speaker
James Annis
(Fermilab)
Description
We, in conjunction with the Dark Energy Survey, are
using the large DECam on the CTIO Blanco 4m telescope for a program of
identifying the optical counterparts of the sources of gravitational waves
detected by the Advanced Ligo and Advanced Virgo network.
The most likely optical counterparts are the fascinating kilonova,
the light from decompressing neutron star matter undergoing r-process
nucleosynthesis and radioactively decaying. These are likely to be
relatively dim, only visible out to a few hundred megaparsecs.
This requires imaging hundreds of sq-degrees of ALIGO localization
probability areas to locate i~21 to i~22 mag fading objects in
a background of supernova, variable stars, and less common
transient objects. We present a description of the program,
analysis techniques, simulations which show the completeness and purity
of our search, and present results from our first season.
The aim of the program is the develop the techniques for
detecting and obtaining the redshifts for
sample of kilonova large enough to pursue a direct Ho measurement.
Author
James Annis
(Fermilab)
