Localizing gravitational wave sources with optical telescopes and combining electromagnetic and gravitational wave data

Understand

Neutron star binaries, which are among the most promising sources for the direct detection of gravitational waves (GW) by ground based detectors, are also potential electromagnetic (EM) emitters.

• Gravitational waves will provide a new window to observe these events and hopefully give us glimpses of new astrophysics.
• In this paper, we discuss how EM information of these events can considerably improve GW parameter estimation both in terms of accuracy and computational power requirement.
• And then in return how GW sky localization can help EM astronomers in follow-up studies of sources which did not yield any prompt emission.