Las Cumbres Observatory Gravitational-Wave Follow-up in O3 and O4: Strengths and Weaknesses of a Rapid Response Galaxy Targeted Strategy

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Las Cumbres Observatory's rapid-response, galaxy-targeted strategy for gravitational-wave follow-up during GW O3 and O4, highlighting strengths and limitations.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the response time, depth, and efficiency of the galaxy-targeted follow-up strategy in recent GW observing runs.

Findings

LCO can respond within minutes to GW alerts.

Observations can detect kilonovae out to 250 Mpc.

Galaxy-targeted follow-up was less efficient than predicted.

Abstract

We present a summary of gravitational-wave (GW) follow-up using the Las Cumbres Observatory global network of telescopes during the third (O3) and fourth (O4) observing runs of the GW detectors. As in O2, we implemented the Gehrels et al. 2016 galaxy-targeted strategy. Here we test its efficacy in O3 and O4 and analyze the Las Cumbres Observatory response time and depth for nine GW alerts that showed a possibility of having an electromagnetic counterpart (GW190425, GW190426_152155, S190510g, GW190728_064510, GW190814, S190822c, GW191216_213338, S240422ed and S250206dm). We find that Las Cumbres Observatory is able to begin observations in response to GW alerts within minutes of the alert, with the observations being deep enough to detect possible GW170817-like kilonovae out to a median distance of 250 Mpc. In this sense a global rapid-response network of telescopes like Las Cumbres is an excellent GW follow-up facility. However, the galaxy-targeted follow-up strategy was much less efficient in O3 and O4 than originally predicted, given the larger than assumed GW localizations. We conclude that coordination between various facilities to include both wide-field and rapid-response capabilities is required to achieve efficient and comprehensive follow-up of GW events.