Impact of noise transients on low latency gravitational-wave event localisation

TL;DR

This study evaluates how non-Gaussian noise transients, called glitches, influence the accuracy of low latency sky localisation of gravitational-wave events, highlighting the varying impacts on different source types and detector configurations.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis of glitch effects on GW localisation accuracy across different glitch types, source classes, and detector networks, informing strategies for electromagnetic follow-up.

Findings

Blip glitches can cause complete misses of BBH events in localisation.

Thunderstorm glitches significantly impact BBH and NSBH localisations, especially with fewer detectors.

Fast scattering glitches affect NSBH localisation only in low latency scenarios.

Abstract

Gravitational-wave (GW) data contains non-Gaussian noise transients called "glitches". During the third LIGO-Virgo observing run about 24% of all gravitational-wave candidates were in the vicinity of a glitch, while even more events could be affected in future observing runs due to increasing detector sensitivity. This poses a problem since glitches can affect the estimation of GW source parameters, including sky localisation, which is crucial to identify an electromagnetic (EM) counterpart. In this paper we present a study that estimates how much sky localisation is affected by a nearby glitch in low latency. We injected binary black hole (BBH), binary neutron star (BNS) and neutron star-black hole (NSBH) signals into data containing three different classes of glitches: blips, thunderstorms and fast scatterings. The impact of these glitches was assessed by estimating the number of tile pointings that a telescope would need to search over until the true sky location of an event is observed. We found that blip glitches affect the localisation of BBH mergers the most; in the most extreme cases a BBH event is completely missed even by a 20 deg$^2$ field-of-view (FOV) telescope. Thunderstorm glitches have the biggest impact on BBH and NSBH events, especially if there is no third interferometer, while BNS events appear to be not affected. Fast scattering glitches impact low latency localisation only for NSBH signals. For two-interferometer network small (FOV=1 deg$^2$) and large (FOV=20 deg$^2$) telescopes are affected, whereas three-interferometer localisation bias is small enough not to affect large (FOV=20 deg$^2$) telescopes.