Date: Monday 28-Aug-2017
Speaker: Phil Cowperthwaite (Harvard)
Title: "Deep Rapid Optical Follow-Up of Gravitational Wave Sources with DECam"
Identifying the electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave (GW) event is one of the great observational challenges in modern astronomy. I report on my work to overcome this challenge by investigating the theoretical and practical issues associated with optical follow-up of a GW event. First, I will present work from the ongoing collaboration between community observers and the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to execute rapid optical follow-up of GW events reported by Advanced LIGO. I will then present work on a systematic study of the potential contaminant population and their impact on counterpart detectability using data taken with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). These data serve as a mock follow-up to a GW event and assist in the characterization of contamination not captured in simulations. Lastly, I will discuss the future prospects in the field as new facilities come online over the next decade.
