hide
Free keywords:
Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
We present the results of targeted searches for gravitational wave transients
associated with gamma-ray bursts during the second observing run of Advanced
LIGO and Advanced Virgo, which took place from November 2016 to August 2017. We
have analyzed 98 gamma-ray bursts using an unmodeled search method that
searches for generic transient gravitational waves and 42 with a modeled search
method that targets compact-binary mergers as progenitors of short gamma-ray
bursts. Both methods clearly detect the previously reported binary merger
signal GW170817, with p-values of $<9.38 \times 10^{-6}$ (modeled) and $3.1
\times 10^{-4}$ (unmodeled). We find no evidence of associated
gravitational-wave signals for any of the other gamma-ray bursts analyzed, and
therefore report lower bounds on the distance to each of these, assuming
various source types and signal morphologies. Using our final modeled search
results, short gamma-ray burst observations, and assuming binary neutron star
progenitors, we place bounds on the rate of short gamma-ray bursts as a
function of redshift for $z \leq 1$ and estimate 0.07-1.80 detections for the
2019-20 LIGO-Virgo observing run and 0.15-3.90 joint detections per year when
current gravitational-wave detectors are operating at design sensitivities.