Skip to main content
Testing. You are viewing the public testing version of GCN. For the production version, go to https://gcn.nasa.gov.
Announcing GCN Classic Migration Survey, End of Legacy Circulars Email. See news and announcements

GCN Circular 21676

Subject
LIGO/Virgo G298048: LOFAR follow-up
Date
2017-08-24T13:35:06Z (7 years ago)
From
Peter Jonker at SRON/RU <p.jonker@sron.nl>
J.W. Broderick (ASTRON), A. Rowlinson (UvA, ASTRON), P.G. Jonker (SRON, RU), R.P. Fender (Oxford), R.A.M.J. Wijers (UvA), B.W. Stappers (Manchester), S. ter Veen (ASTRON), S. Nissanke (RU) and A. Shulevski (ASTRON) report on behalf of the LOFAR Transients Key Science Project

On 2017 August 22, we conducted a LOFAR follow-up observation of the Advanced LIGO/Virgo trigger G298048 with the ILT (International Low-Frequency Array [LOFAR] Telescope). This is a highly experimental observation to assess whether images of sufficient quality can be obtained at very low elevations. The observation began at 14:05:00 UTC, near transit, with any useable data likely only within the first hour. We placed two beams on the most northerly part of the probability distribution, as determined from the preliminary LALInference map. The bandwidth for each beam is 47.5 MHz, spread over the frequency range 120-187 MHz. The beam centres (RA/Dec), in degrees, are as follows:

1) 192.4167   -15.8333
2) 193.1875   -17.0000

where the field of view per beam is 11.35 deg^2 at 150 MHz. Analysis is ongoing, with the possibility of further observations if this test run is deemed to have been successful.  
  
We thank the ASTRON Radio Observatory for rapidly scheduling the observations.
Looking for U.S. government information and services? Visit USA.gov