Searching for electromagnetic emission in an AGN from the gravitational wave binary black hole merger candidate S230922g
We carried out long-term monitoring of the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA binary black hole (BBH) merger candidate S230922g in search of electromagnetic emission from the interaction of the merger remnant with an embedding active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disk. Using a dataset primarily composed of wide-field imaging from the Dark Energy Camera and supplemented by additional photometric and spectroscopic resources, we searched $\ensuremath{\sim}70%$ of the sky area probability for transient phenomena and discovered six counterpart candidates. One especially promising candidate---AT 2023aagj---exhibited temporally varying asymmetric components in spectral broad line regions, a feature potentially indicative of an off-center event such as a BBH merger. This represents the first live search and multiwavelength, photometric, and spectroscopic monitoring of a gravitational wave BBH optical counterpart candidate in the disk of an AGN.
Authors
- Barry McKernan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9726-0508)
- D. Gruen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3270-7644)
- K. E. Saavik Ford (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5956-851X)
- A. Riffeser (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5466-3892)
- F. Valdés (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5567-1301)
- M. J. Graham (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3168-0139)
- A. Palmese (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6011-0530)
- Brendan O’Connor (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9700-0036)
- P. Clark (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6576-7400)
- Julian S. Sommer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1154-8317)
- Tomás Cabrera (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1270-7666)
- M. W. Coughlin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8262-2924)
- Igor Andreoni (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8977-1498)
- Lei Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9124-5411)
- Ariel Amsellem (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3433-2698)
- Ekaterine Dadiani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6586-4297)
- Tomás Ahumada (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2184-6430)
- Keerthi Kunnumkai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4830-1484)
- Jake Postiglione (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0738-8186)
- Malte Busmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0574-2332)
- Verónica Marín Díaz
Institutions
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Goddard Space Flight Center (US)
- American Museum of Natural History (US)
- City University of New York (US)
- University of Minnesota System (US)
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (DE)
- Excellence Cluster Origins (DE)
- NSF NOIRLab (US)
- Flatiron Health (United States) (US)
- Flatiron Institute (US)
- University of Portsmouth (GB)
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
- Published
- 2024-12-20
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.110.123029
- Citations
- 15
- Primary Topic
- Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.97
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Simons Foundation
- Stanford University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Ohio State University
- California Institute of Technology
- University of Chicago
- University of Michigan
- Texas A and M University
- University of Portsmouth
- National Centre for Supercomputing Applications
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- Ministarstvo znanosti i obrazovanja
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- University of Cambridge
- University College London
- University of Nottingham
- University of Sussex
- University of Edinburgh
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
- Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
- Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
- Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- Institut de Física d'Altes Energies
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Office of Science
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Ohio State University
- Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago
- Science and Technology Facilities Council
- Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
- National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Division of Astronomical Sciences
- High Energy Physics
- Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, Binghamton University
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Fermilab
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory