1. Searching for electromagnetic emission in an AGN from the gravitational wave binary black hole merger candidate S230922g
- Author
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Cabrera, Tomás, Palmese, Antonella, Hu, Lei, O'Connor, Brendan, Ford, K. E. Saavik, McKernan, Barry, Andreoni, Igor, Ahumada, Tomás, Amsellem, Ariel, Busmann, Malte, Clark, Peter, Coughlin, Michael W., Dadiani, Ekaterine, Diaz, Veronica, Graham, Matthew J., Gruen, Daniel, Kunnumkai, Keerthi, Postiglione, Jake, Sommer, Julian S., and Valdes, Francisco
- Subjects
Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies - Abstract
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 (DECam) and supplemented by additional photometric and spectroscopic resources, we searched ~ 70% of the sky area probability for transient phenomena, and discovered 6 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 GW BBH optical counterpart candidate in the disk of an AGN., Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures. Comments welcome
- Published
- 2024