gravitational waves and VOEvent

[Rob Seaman]

I don't think such questions can be answered a priori.  A series of data challenges would clarify not only the internal infrastructure questions, but also the external data representation questions.  Collaborations will use all the tools you mention and others (python, IDL, ...), but more fundamentally will be driven by the nature of the individual science they may be pursuing.

Certainly the community won't balk at FITS images or binary tables (especially if tile compressed :-) to convey imaging and tabular data products.

Numerous questions suggest themselves regarding the notices themselves.  How rapidly will they be generated?  How rapidly are they anticipated to go stale?  What classes of colossal gravitational mash-ups will LIGO be sensitive to?  To what extent do you expect to be able to attach probabilities differentiating these?  Are these anticipated to each correspond to shenanigans in external galaxies?  Presumably the project will be able then to assign a probability to each nearby catalog galaxy (above some cut-off) that might be the host?  So perhaps just one of those nifty new embedded VOEvent 2 tables listing the top ten (or a hundred) candidates for follow-up at any and all wavelengths?  And then references to archival template images, finding charts, foreground object lists to avoid confusion.

Which is to say start with the experimental design and flow the requirements down to the data representation and iterate over prototype data flows.

Rob Seaman
NOAO SDM
--

On May 25, 2011, at 11:08 AM, Roy Williams wrote:

> I would like to ask this group about rapid follow-up of gravitational wave events, specifically what sort of information would be most useful to the observer community when Notices go out in ~2015. The question is: What tools might be used to establish context, decide on follow-up? DS9? WWT? IRAF? What else? How can we make sure that LIGO data can be easily imported into popular tools?
> 
> The observation from LIGO will not be well localized, rather a wide probability map on the sky that may span several constellations -- see for example (*) . It could be represented in several ways: FITS on an RA/Dec grid, FITS on a Healpix grid, a set of contour lines of probability, a set of 'likely galaxies', or something greatly simplified from the full skymap, what? We are looking for suggestions from the community about what would be the most useful such representations for observers.
> 
> Thank you
> Roy Williams
> LIGO Caltech
> 
> (*) slide 4 of
> http://cgwa.phys.utb.edu/gwdaw13/gwdawfiles/Presentations/GWDAW_day3/12.2%20Searle.pdf