Searches for inspiral gravitational waves associated with short gamma-ray bursts in LIGO's fifth and Virgo's first science run

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for gravitational waves associated with short gamma-ray bursts during LIGO's fifth and Virgo's first science runs, finding no significant signals but setting distance limits on potential sources.

Contribution

It presents the first joint search for gravitational waves from short GRBs using LIGO and Virgo data, establishing constraints on source distances.

Findings

No gravitational-wave signals detected in the sample.

Median exclusion distance of 6.7 Mpc for neutron star-black hole progenitors.

Constraints help refine models of short GRB progenitors.

Abstract

Mergers of two compact objects, like two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, are the probable progenitor of short gamma-ray bursts. These events are also promising sources of gravitational waves, that are currently motivating related searches by an international network of gravitational wave detectors. Here we describe a search for gravitational waves from the in-spiral phase of two coalescing compact objects, in coincidence with short GRBs occurred during during LIGO's fifth science run and Virgo's first science run. The search includes 22 GRBs for which data from more than one of the detectors in the LIGO/Virgo network were available. No statistically significant gravitational-wave candidate has been found, and a parametric test shows no excess of weak gravitational-wave signals in our sample of GRBs. The 90\%~C.L. median exclusion distance for GRBs in our sample is of 6.7 Mpc, under the hypothesis of a neutron star - black hole progenitor model.