The first six months of the Advanced LIGO’s and Advanced Virgo’s third observing run with GRANDMA

We present the Global Rapid Advanced Network Devoted to the Multi-messenger Addicts (GRANDMA). The network consists of 21 telescopes with both photometric and spectroscopic facilities. They are connected together thanks to a dedicated infrastructure. The network aims at coordinating the observations of large sky position estimates of transient events to enhance their follow-up and reduce the delay between the initial detection and optical confirmation. The GRANDMA programme mainly focuses on follow-up of gravitational-wave alerts to find and characterize the electromagnetic counterpart during the third observational campaign of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. But it allows for follow-up of any transient alerts involving neutrinos or gamma-ray bursts, even those with poor spatial localization. We present the different facilities, tools, and methods we developed for this network and show its efficiency using observations of LIGO/Virgo S190425z, a binary neutron star merger candidate.We furthermore report on allGRANDMAfollow-up observations performed during the first six months of the LIGO-Virgo observational campaign, and we derive constraints on the kilonova properties assuming that the events' locations were imaged by our telescopes. © 2019 The Author(s).
Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), through project number CE170100004. EJH acknowledges support from a Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (DE170100891). AdUP and CCT acknowledge support from Ramon y Cajal fellowships RyC-2012-09975 and RyC-201209984 and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through project AYA2017-89384-P. DAK acknowledges support from the Spanish research projectAYA2017-89384-P. MBacknowledges funding as `personal tecnico de apoyo' under fellowship number PTA2016-13192-I. MC is supported by the David and Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. SA is supported by the CNES Postdoctoral Fellowship at Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie. SA, AC, CL, and RM acknowledge the financial support of the UnivEarthS Labex program at Sorbonne Paris Cite (ANR-10-LABX-0023 and ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02). SA and NL acknowledge the financial support of the Programme National Hautes Energies (PNHE). DT acknowledges the financial support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) PIFI post-doctoral fellowship program (program C). UBAI acknowledges support from the Ministry of Innovative Development through projects FA-Atech-2018-392 and VA-FAF-2-010. IRiS has been carried out thanks to the support of the OCEVU Labex (ANR-11-LABX-0060) and the A*MIDEX project (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the 'Investissements d'Avenir' French government program. IRiS and T120 thank all the Observatoire de Haute-Provence staff for the permanent support. SB, NK, RN, and MV acknowledge the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation (SRNSF grant No 218070). TAROT has been built with the support of the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers, CNRS,France. TAROT is funded by theCNESand thanks the help of the technical staff of the Observatoire de Haute Provence, OSU-Pytheas.