Optimizing searches for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave triggers

Understand

With the detection of a binary neutron star system and its corresponding electromagnetic counterparts, a new window of transient astronomy has opened.

• Due to the size of the error regions, which can span hundreds to thousands of square degrees, there are significant benefits to optimizing tilings for these large sky areas.
• The rich science promised by gravitational-wave astronomy has led to the proposal for a variety of tiling and time allocation schemes, and for the first time, we make a systematic comparison of some of these methods.
• We find that differences of a factor of 2 or more in efficiency are possible, depending on the algorithm employed.