Kilonova constraints for the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA neutron star merger candidate S250206dm: GW-MMADS observations
Kilonova constraints for the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA neutron star merger candidate S250206dm: GW-MMADS observations
Lei Hu, Tomás Cabrera, Antonella Palmese, James Freeburn, Mattia Bulla, Igor Andreoni, Xander J. Hall, Brendan O'Connor, Ariel Amsellem, Clécio R. Bom, Malte Busmann, Jennifer Fabà, Julius Gassert, Sena Kalabalik, Keerthi Kunnumkai, Daniel Gruen, Luidhy Santana-Silva, André Santos, Tomás Ahumada, Jonathan Carney, Michael W. Coughlin, Xingzhuo Chen, K. E. Saavik Ford, Daniel E. Holz, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Ignacio Magaña Hernandez, Cassidy Mihalenko, Rosalba Perna, Arno Riffeser, Christoph Ries, Lena Schnappinger, Michael Schmidt, Julian Sommer, Sarah Teague, Pablo Vega, Olga Volchansky, Lifan Wang, Yajie Zhang
AbstractGravitational wave (GW) neutron star mergers with an associated electromagnetic counterpart constitute powerful probes of binary evolution, the production sites of heavy elements, general relativity, and the expansion of the universe. Only a handful of candidate GW binary mergers during the fourth LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA observing run (O4) so far are believed to include a neutron star. We present optical-near infrared follow-up observations of the candidate neutron-star black hole GW merger S250206dm. This is the first high-significance mass gap neutron star-black hole candidate observed by multiple GW detectors (thus having a significantly smaller sky localization than one-detector events), offering the first opportunity to effectively follow up a GW event of this kind. Our GW MultiMessenger Astronomy DECam Survey (GW-MMADS) campaign consisted of a wide-field search using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) and T80-South (T80S), as well as galaxy-targeted observations using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) imager and the Wendelstein 2.1m 3-channel camera. No viable kilonova counterpart was found in our observations. We use our observation depths to place competitive constraints on kilonova models similar to or brighter than the GW170817 kilonova AT 2017gfo within our observed fields, ruling out 100\% of such models with SOAR galaxy-targeted observations and $\sim43$\% (48\%) with DECam (DECam and T80S).