The version of uvex-followup used for this study can be found on Zenodo (Criswell 2024). The data products created for this work are available on Zenodo (Leggio & Criswell 2024). The observing scenarios used in this work are publicly available; see Kiendrebeogo et al. (2023) and references therein.
Published May 2025
| Version Published
Journal Article
Open
Electromagnetic Follow-up to Gravitational Wave Events with the UltraViolet EXplorer (UVEX)
Creators
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1.
University of Minnesota
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2.
Vanderbilt University
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3.
Fisk University
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4.
Goddard Space Flight Center
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5.
University of Ouagadougou
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6.
Astrophysique Relativiste, Théories, Expériences, Métrologie, Instrumentation, Signaux
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7.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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8.
California Institute of Technology
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9.
Johns Hopkins University
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10.
Space Telescope Science Institute
Abstract
The Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX) is expected to fly in 2030 and will have the opportunity—and the rapid near/far-ultraviolet (UV) capabilities—to glean unprecedented insight into the bright UV emission present in kilonovae like that of AT 170817gfo, the electromagnetic counterpart to binary neutron star merger GW170817. To do so, it will need to perform prompt target-of-opportunity observations following detection of binary neutron star mergers by the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA gravitational observatories. We present initial simulations to develop UVEX target-of-opportunity strategies for such events and provide the community with detailed initial estimates of the prospects for and characteristics of UVEX target-of-opportunity observations following gravitational-wave events, considering fiducial scenarios for the fifth and sixth LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA observing runs. Additionally, in light of the relatively few binary neutron star mergers observed since GW170817, we consider variant target-of-opportunity strategies for UVEX to maximize scientific gain in the case of a lowered binary neutron star merger rate.
Copyright and License
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP).
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
Portions of this manuscript were adapted from the doctoral dissertation of A.W.C., Astrophysical Inferences from Multimessenger Ensembles. A.W.C. acknowledges support by NSF grant No. 2125764. M.W.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant Nos PHY-2308862 and PHY-2117997. The authors acknowledge the use of computing resources provided by the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota. This work used the Delta CPU at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications through allocation AST200029 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services and Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by U.S. National Science Foundation grants Nos. 2138259, 2138286, 2138307, 2137603, and 2138296.
Software References
uvex-followup (https://github.com/criswellalexander/uvex-followup), dorado-scheduling (https://github.com/nasa/dorado-scheduling), uvex-mission (Grefenstette et al., private repository), BAYESTAR (Singer & Price 2016), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), Numpy (Harris et al. 2020), Scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Python (Van Rossum & Drake 2009), Healpy (Zonca et al. 2019), Pandas (McKinney 2010), and Astropy (Robitaille et al. 2013; The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018; Astropy Collaboration et al. 2022).
Data Availability
Files
Criswell_2025_PASP_137_054101.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2501.14109 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.14014700 (DOI)
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.14014902 (DOI)
- Software: https://github.com/criswellalexander/uvex-followup (URL)
- Software: https://github.com/nasa/dorado-scheduling (URL)
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-2125764
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2308862
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2117997
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-04-16
- Available
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2025-05-02Published