EM Follow-Up

The true potential of gravitational waves in probing astronomical phenomena will be realized when a network of gravitational-wave detectors is able to localize their sources to small patches in the sky so that telescopes can slew and spot any optical, X-ray, or radio counterpart they may emit.

Combining information channeled through both gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations can teach us much more about these distant violent events in the universe than what any one type of observation can do. Varun Bhalerao, Sukanta Bose, Javed Rana, and Bhooshan Gadre are working in this area of research.

SELECTED REFERENCES

1. Javed Rana, Akshat Singhal, Bhooshan Gadre, Varun Bhalerao, Sukanta Bose, “An optimal method for scheduling observations of large sky error regions for finding optical counterparts to transients,” arxiv link.