Galaxy Strategy for LIGO-Virgo Gravitational Wave Counterpart Searches

Understand

In this work we continue a line of inquiry begun in Kanner et al.

• which detailed a strategy for utilizing telescopes with narrow fields of view, such as the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT), to localize gravity wave (GW) triggers from LIGO/Virgo.
• If one considers the brightest galaxies that produce ~50% of the light, then the number of galaxies inside typical GW error boxes will be several tens.
• We have found that this result applies both in the early years of Advanced LIGO when the range is small and the error boxes large, and in the later years when the error boxes will be small and the range large.