Swift follow-up observations of candidate gravitational-wave transient events

Understand

We present the first multi-wavelength follow-up observations of two candidate gravitational-wave (GW) transient events recorded by LIGO and Virgo in their 2009-2010 science run.

• The events were selected with low latency by the network of GW detectors and their candidate sky locations were observed by the Swift observatory.
• Image transient detection was used to analyze the collected electromagnetic data, which were found to be consistent with background.
• Off-line analysis of the GW data alone has also established that the selected GW events show no evidence of an astrophysical origin; one of them is consistent with background and the other one was a test, part of a "blind injection challenge".