Multimessenger signatures of compact binaries

Abstract

Gravitational waves and electromagnetic observations provide complementary views into some of the most extreme objects in the Universe. In this thesis, I present studies of multimessenger compact binaries from two angles: electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational-waves, and gravitational-wave follow-up of electromagnetic sources. I first describe technical and computational efforts to enable the distribution of alerts of kHz gravitational-wave sources as a member of the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA collaboration, and to improve localizations of these events by folding in galaxy catalog information. I then detail work to enable electromagnetic follow-up observations of binary neutron star and neutron star--black hole mergers with two telescopes, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Wide-field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER). Approaching multimessenger observations from the opposite direction, I describe a search for gravitational waves coincident with fast radio bursts from the only Galactic fast radio burst source. Lastly, I perform an electromagnetic study of Type Ia supernovae in the mid-infrared, whose white dwarf binary progenitors will be mHz gravitational-wave sources for the future LISA space mission.