MRI: Development of Telescope Arrays to Image the Optical Counterparts of Mergers within Two Seconds of Gravitational-Wave Detection and Observe Supernovae at the Time of Explosion

The merger of a pair of black holes or neutron stars creates gravitational waves. Mergers that lead to explosions also emit light, which conveys information about the heavy elements that are created. Since 2015, astronomers have recorded the gravitational waves from fifty mergers.

However, visible light from only a single merger has been clearly pinpointed. This project will develop telescopes in New Mexico and Greece that can image a large region of the sky within just two seconds of an alert. By searching more quickly than existing facilities can do, the telescopes will identify new, brightening sources on the sky and obtain early data.

The project will also monitor nearby galaxies for very young supernovae. Undergraduates from Minnesota and New Mexico as well as citizen scientists will participate. The inclusion of underrepresented minorities, notably Native Americans and Hispanics, is planned in various aspects of the work that will provide broad training suitable for future academic or private industry careers.

At each site, the Total-Coverage Ultra-Fast Response to Binary Mergers Observatory (TURBO) will consist of large-format CMOS detectors mounted on sixteen 0.20-meter diameter optical telescopes. Within two seconds of a trigger alert, TURBO will begin obtaining continuous, multi-band images of up to 240 square degrees. A prototype telescope in St.

Paul, Minnesota has been implemented that can acquire images within two seconds of an alert. Counterparts to gravitational-wave detections of mergers will multiply the information available from just the gravitational waves alone by revealing the mergers’ distances, environments, and nucleosynthetic products. Given its unique sensitivity to prompt emission, TURBO may detect novel types of counterparts, yielding potential insights, for example, into the poorly understood observed population of binary black-hole mergers.

Observations of supernovae in nearby galaxies at the time of explosion (4-6 events each year) can be expected to provide new understanding of their stellar progenitor populations and explosion mechanisms. The opportunity to included numerous undergraduate students in research projects and the use of Zooinverse in analysis of the data is planned.

This project advances the goals of the Windows on the Universe Big Idea.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.