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One of the 3 km arms of the Virgo gravitational-wave detector

Binary neutron-star merger · 17 August 2017

GW170817

Gravitational waves and light from the same neutron-star merger, the birth of multi-messenger astrophysics.

Our part

Fabian and his PhD student Monica Seglar-Arroyo selected the H.E.S.S. pointings. Observations were requested five minutes after LIGO/Virgo published the localisation and started the same evening.

Follow-up, step by step

  1. T0
    Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo

    Record a gravitational-wave signal from a binary neutron-star merger.

  2. T0 + 2 s
    Fermi-GBM

    Detects the short gamma-ray burst GRB 170817A.

  3. Localisation + 5 min
    H.E.S.S.

    Observations requested using target-selection algorithms prepared in advance.

  4. 17:59 UTC
    H.E.S.S.

    First observations of the high-probability regions start.

  5. October 2017
    Publications

    H.E.S.S. results in ApJ Letters, together with the joint multi-messenger paper of all observatories.

H.E.S.S. pointing directions of the first night of follow-up observations over the GW170817 localisation map, and the significance map around the optical counterpart SSS17a

Papers

Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger

LIGO Scientific, Virgo, Fermi GBM, INTEGRAL, IceCube, AstroSat Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager Team, IPN, Insight-Hxmt, ANTARES, Swift, AGILE Team, 1M2H Team, Dark Energy Camera GW-EM, DES, DLT40, GRAWITA, Fermi-LAT, ATCA, ASKAP, Las Cumbres Observatory Group, OzGrav, DWF (Deeper Wider Faster Program), AST3, CAASTRO, VINROUGE, MASTER, J-GEM, GROWTH, JAGWAR, CaltechNRAO, TTU-NRAO, NuSTAR, Pan-STARRS, MAXI Team, TZAC Consortium, KU, Nordic Optical Telescope, ePESSTO, GROND, Texas Tech University, SALT Group, TOROS, BOOTES, MWA, CALET, IKI-GW Follow-up, H.E.S.S., LOFAR, LWA, HAWC, Pierre Auger, ALMA, Euro VLBI Team, Pi of Sky, Chandra Team at McGill University, DFN, ATLAS Telescopes, High Time Resolution Universe Survey, RIMAS, RATIR, SKA South Africa/MeerKAT · 2017 · Astrophys.J.Lett. 848 L12

arXivINSPIRE

From the news

The story as it happened.