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Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
We present a search for binary neutron star mergers during the first
observing run of Advanced LIGO that produce both gravitational-wave and
gamma-ray emission similar to GW170817 and GRB 170817A. We introduce a method
to detect sources that do not produce significant gravitational-wave or
gamma-ray burst candidates individually. Searches of this type can increase by
70\% the detections of joint gravitational-wave and gamma-ray signals. We find
one possible candidate at a false alarm rate of 1 in 13 years. If confirmed,
this candidate would correspond to a merger at $187^{+99}_{-87}\,$Mpc with
source-frame chirp mass of $1.30^{+0.02}_{-0.03}\,M_{\odot}$. If we assume the
viewing angle must be $<30^{\circ}$ to be observed by Fermi-GBM, our estimate
of the distance would become $224^{+88}_{-78}\,$Mpc. By comparing the rate of
binary neutron star mergers to our search-estimated rate of false alarms, we
estimate that there is a 1 in 4 chance this candidate is astrophysical in
origin.