First Gravitational-Wave Burst GW150914: Part II. MASTER Optical Follow-Up Observations

TL;DR

This paper reports on optical follow-up observations of the first gravitational wave event GW150914, confirming the event's origin from a binary black hole merger through the detection of unrelated optical transients.

Contribution

It presents the first optical follow-up observations of GW150914 using the MASTER network, providing evidence supporting the black hole merger origin of the gravitational wave.

Findings

Optical transients detected were unrelated to GW150914.

Results support the binary black hole merger hypothesis.

Confirmation of gravitational wave predictions through optical observations.

Abstract

The Advanced LIGO observatory recently reported the first direct detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein (1916). We report on the first optical observations of the Gravitational Wave (GW) source GW150914 error region with the Global MASTER Robotic Net. We detected several optical transients, which proved to be unconnected with the GW event. Our result is consistent with the assumption that gravitational waves were produced by a binary black hole merger. The detection of the event confirmed the main prediction of the population synthesis performed with the "Scenario Machine" formulated in Lipunov1997b.