The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a project dedicated to identifying optical counterparts to gravitational-wave detections using a network of dedicated, wide-field telescopes. After almost a decade of design, construction, and commissioning work, the GOTO network is now fully operational with two antipodal sites: La Palma in the Canary Islands and Siding Spring in Australia. Both sites host two independent robotic mounts, each with a field-of-view of 44 square degrees formed by an array of eight 40cm telescopes, resulting in an instantaneous 88 square degree field-of-view per site. All four telescopes operate as a single integrated network, with the ultimate aim of surveying the entire sky every 2–3 days and allowing near-24-hour response to transient events within a minute of their detection. In the modern era of transient astronomy, automated telescopes like GOTO form a vital link between multi-messenger discovery facilities and in-depth follow-up by larger telescopes. GOTO is already producing a wide range of scientific results, assisted by an efficient discovery pipeline and a successful citizen science project: Kilonova Seekers.
The search for the electromagnetic counterparts to Gravitational Wave (GW) events has been rapidly gathering pace in recent years thanks to the increasing number and capabilities of both gravitational wave detectors and wide field survey telescopes. Difficulties remain, however, in detecting these counterparts due to their inherent scarcity, faintness and rapidly evolving nature. To find these counterparts, it is important that one optimizes the observing strategy for their recovery. This can be difficult due to the large number of potential variables at play. Such follow-up campaigns are also capable of detecting hundreds or potentially thousands of unrelated transients, particularly for GW events with poor localization. Even if the observations are capable of detecting a counterpart, finding it among the numerous contaminants can prove challenging. Here we present the Gravitational wave Electromagnetic RecovRY code (GERRY) to perform detailed analysis and survey-agnostic quantification of observing campaigns attempting to recover electromagnetic counterparts. GERRY considers the campaign’s spatial, temporal and wavelength coverage, in addition to Galactic extinction and the expected counterpart light curve evolution from the GW 3D localization volume. It returns quantified statistics that can be used to: determine the probability of having detected the counterpart, identified the most promising sources, and assessed and refine strategy. Here we demonstrate the code to look at the performance and parameter space probed by current and upcoming wide-field surveys such as GOTO and VRO.
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. Each GOTO robotic mount holds eight 40 cm telescopes, giving an overall field of view of 40 square degrees. As of 2022 the first two GOTO mounts have been commissioned at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands, and construction of the second node with two additional 8-telescope mounts has begin at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. Once fully operational each GOTO mount will be networked to form a robotic, multi-site observatory, which will survey the entire visible sky every two nights and enable rapid follow-up detections of transient sources.
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