In the Dark

It seems that the engineering data ahead of the imminent observing run from the newly refurbished LIGO gravitational wave observatory has just triggered an alert for astronomers to look for an electromagnetic counterpart. The code number for this candidate event is S230518h. If confirmed this could very well be another Neutron-Star – Black Hole merger event. The search area is rather large, with the 90% probability region being about 1002 square degrees on the sky:

For more details, see here.

I’m reminded about the excitement surrounding the first Neutron Star merger way back in 2017. In fact, rumours started to spread via this blog as people outside the LIGO/transient source community used a comments thread here to share information of where telescopes were looking. Those were the days. Was that really 6 years ago?

This entry was posted on May 18, 2023 at 4:05 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Advanced LIGO, black hole, gravitational waves, LIGO, neutron star, S230518h. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.