Swift-XRT Follow-up of Gravitational Wave Triggers in the Second Advanced LIGO/Virgo Observing Run

TL;DR

This paper details Swift-XRT follow-up observations of LIGO/Virgo GW triggers during O2, discussing detection efforts, results, and lessons learned to enhance future electromagnetic counterpart searches.

Contribution

It presents the first systematic Swift-XRT follow-up of GW events in O2, including a source ranking system and simulation-based evaluation of afterglow detection capabilities.

Findings

No electromagnetic counterparts were detected in O2.

Approximately 60-70% of potential GRB afterglows are identified as interesting after two follow-ups.

Additional observations can increase the detection probability to nearly 100%.

Abstract

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory carried out prompt searches for gravitational wave (GW) events detected by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration (LVC) during the second observing run ("O2"). Swift performed extensive tiling of eight LVC triggers, two of which had very low false-alarm rates (GW 170814 and the epochal GW 170817), indicating a high confidence of being astrophysical in origin; the latter was the first GW event to have an electromagnetic counterpart detected. In this paper we describe the follow-up performed during O2 and the results of our searches. No GW electromagnetic counterparts were detected; this result is expected, as GW 170817 remained the only astrophysical event containing at least one neutron star after LVC's later retraction of some events. A number of X-ray sources were detected, with the majority of identified sources being active galactic nuclei. We discuss the detection rate of transient X-ray sources and their implications in the O2 tiling searches. Finally, we describe the lessons learned during O2, and how these are being used to improve the \swift\ follow-up of GW events. In particular, we simulate a population of GRB afterglows to evaluate our source ranking system's ability to differentiate them from unrelated and uncatalogued X-ray sources. We find that $\approx$60-70% of afterglows whose jets are oriented towards Earth will be given high rank (i.e., "interesting" designation) by the completion of our second follow-up phase (assuming their location in the sky was observed), but that this fraction can be increased to nearly 100% by performing a third follow-up observation of sources exhibiting fading behavior.