GLADE+: An Extended Galaxy Catalogue for Multimessenger Searches with Advanced Gravitational-wave Detectors

TL;DR

GLADE+ is an expanded galaxy catalogue designed to enhance multimessenger searches for gravitational-wave counterparts by combining multiple data sources, estimating galaxy properties, and ranking potential host galaxies within GW localization volumes.

Contribution

It introduces GLADE+ with integrated galaxy data, peculiar velocity corrections, and galaxy property estimations, improving the identification of likely host galaxies for gravitational-wave events.

Findings

Complete up to 47 Mpc in B-band luminosity

Contains brightest galaxies for 90% of luminosity up to 130 Mpc

Provides galaxy properties to aid in GW counterpart searches

Abstract

We present GLADE+, an extended version of the GLADE galaxy catalogue introduced in our previous paper for multimessenger searches with advanced gravitational-wave detectors. GLADE+ combines data from six separate but not independent astronomical catalogues: the GWGC, 2MPZ, 2MASS XSC, HyperLEDA, and WISExSCOSPZ galaxy catalogues, and the SDSS-DR16Q quasar catalogue. To allow corrections of CMB-frame redshifts for peculiar motions, we calculated peculiar velocities along with their standard deviations of all galaxies having $B$-band magnitude data within redshift $z=0.05$ using the "Bayesian Origin Reconstruction from Galaxies" formalism. GLADE+ is complete up to luminosity distance $d_L=47^{+4}_{-2}$ Mpc in terms of the total expected $B$-band luminosity of galaxies, and contains all of the brightest galaxies giving 90\% of the total $B$-band and $K$-band luminosity up to $d_L\simeq 130$ Mpc. We include estimations of stellar masses and individual binary neutron star merger rates for galaxies with $W1$ magnitudes. These parameters can help in ranking galaxies in a given gravitational wave localization volume in terms of their likelihood of being hosts, thereby possibly reducing the number of pointings and total integration time needed to find the electromagnetic counterpart.