Advance Alerts from Gravitational Wave Searches of Binary Compact Objects for Electromagnetic Follow-ups

Abstract

The first binary neutron star inspiral was observed on 17 th Aug 2017 at 12:41:04 UTC by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. The signal, GW170817 had multiple electromagnetic counterparts – a γ-ray burst and other transients. We expect more mergers of this kind to occur in subsequent years. These systems emit gravitational waves while falling into one another. With the help of a network of gravitational wave detectors, one can localize the source in the sky using the gravitational wave signal before the merger. The localization information can be passed on to telescopes in order to observe the system in the electromagnetic regime. In this way, maximum possible information about the binary can be extracted. This method is known as Advance Alert. In this thesis, we demonstrated that Advance Alert can be made faster and more efficient using Particle Swarm Optimization. We show that this method is faster than the current Advance Alert implementation in the detection aspect. With a faster detection, we will have more time to locate the source and observe it. If this method is optimized, it will provide us with a viable technique to observe such systems and aid in multi messenger astronomy.