Search for Coincident Gravitational Wave and Long Gamma-Ray Bursts from 4-OGC and the Fermi-GBM/Swift-BAT Catalog

TL;DR

This study searches for coincident gravitational waves and long gamma-ray bursts in archival data, finding no significant associations, thereby constraining the connection between neutron star mergers and long gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

It revisits LIGO/Virgo and gamma-ray burst catalogs to perform a coincidence search, providing updated constraints on their association and exclusion distances.

Findings

No significant gravitational wave and gamma-ray burst coincidences found.

Most candidate associations have false alarm rates of about once every two years.

Provides exclusion distances for potential sources under various assumptions.

Abstract

The recent discovery of a kilonova associated with an apparent long-duration gamma-ray burst has challenged the typical classification that long gamma-ray bursts originate from the core collapse of massive stars and short gamma-ray bursts are from compact binary coalescence. The kilonova indicates a neutron star merger origin and suggests the viability of gravitational-wave and long gamma-ray burst multimessenger astronomy. Gravitational waves play a crucial role by providing independent information for the source properties. This work revisits the archival 2015-2020 LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave candidates from the 4-OGC catalog which are consistent with a binary neutron star or neutron star-black hole merger and the long-duration gamma-ray bursts from the Fermi-GBM and Swift-BAT catalogs. We search for spatial and temporal coincidence with up to 10 s time lag between gravitational-wave candidates and the onset of long-duration gamma-ray bursts. The most significant candidate association has only a false alarm rate of once every two years; given the LIGO/Virgo observational period, this is consistent with a null result. We report an exclusion distance for each search candidate for a fiducial gravitational-wave signal and conservative viewing angle assumptions.