An empirical limit on the kilonova rate from the DLT40 one day cadence Supernova Survey

Understand

Binary neutron star mergers are important to understand stellar evolution, the chemical enrichment of the universe via the r-process, the physics of short gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves and pulsars.

• The rates at which these coalescences happen is uncertain, but it can be constrained in different ways.
• One of those is to search for the optical transients produced at the moment of the merging, called a kilonova, in ongoing SN searches.
• However, until now, only theoretical models for kilonovae light curve were available to estimate their rates.