The Reliability of the Low-latency Estimation of Binary Neutron Star Chirp Mass
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Biscoveanu_2019_ApJL_884_L32.pdf
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Published version
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Author(s) • •
Biscoveanu, Sylvia
Vitale, Salvatore
Haster, Carl-Johan
Date Issued
October 2019
Journal
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. The LIGO and Virgo Collaborations currently conduct searches for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in real time. For promising candidate events, a sky map and distance estimation are released in low latency to facilitate their electromagnetic follow-up. Currently, no information is released about the masses of the compact objects. Recently, Margalit & Metzger suggested that knowledge of the chirp mass of the detected binary neutron stars could be useful to prioritize the electromagnetic follow-up effort, and urged the LIGO-Virgo collaboration to release chirp mass information in low latency. One might worry that low-latency searches for compact binaries make simplifying assumptions that could introduce biases in the mass parameters: neutron stars are treated as point particles with dimensionless spins below 0.05 perfectly aligned with the orbital angular momentum. Furthermore, the template bank used to search for them has a finite resolution. In this paper we show that none of these limitations can introduce chirp mass biases larger than ∼10-3 M o. Even the total mass is usually accurately estimated, with biases smaller than 6%. The mass ratio and effective inspiral spins, on the other hand, can suffer from more severe biases.
MIT Department
LIGO (Observatory : Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/AB479E