Verónica Villa Ortega
In August 2017, the first detection of the merger of two neutron stars followed by an electromagnetic signal, opened the doors to multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves. Since then, efforts in gravitational wave searches have increased to rapidly identify events involving neutron stars in order to send quick alerts to electromagnetic and neutrino observatories. In this context, being able to estimate the parameters of the gravitational wave sources becomes crucial for guiding these follow-up observation decisions. Unfortunately, parameters such as component masses and spins are measured with high uncertainty by real-time searches and have to be estimated after the candidate event detection.
We have developed a rapid (< 30 s) forecast of the uncertainties in binary masses and spins relative to the candidate identified by our search, applying a Fisher-matrix approximation for the likelihood to a physical prior distribution. This method produces credible regions that could inform follow-up searches and/or more detailed parameter estimation analysis.
