07 February 2020
The needle and the haystack
No firm electromagnetic counterpart of the first black hole / neutron star merger has been found by ENGRAVE. But the hunt continues!
15 November 2019
2nd ENGRAVE collaboration meeting
The second ENGRAVE all-hands meeting was held on November 12-14th, 2019, at the INAF Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory, Naples, under beautiful blue skies and the shadow of Vesuvius. We thank the local organisers led by Maria Teresa Boticella, Aniello Grado and their team of Fabio Ragosta, Pietro Schipani, Andrea Di Dato, Maria Teresa Fulco, A. Maiorica and R. Aiello. ENGRAVE thanks GRAWITA and the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) for their generous support of the meeting, and the Director of the Capodimonte Observatory, Marcella Marconi, for hosting us.
24 September 2019
The mystery of AT 2019osy
While searching for a counterpart to the gravitational wave event from August 14 (S190814bv), astronomers using the ASKAP telescope discovered an unusual transient in the radio band: AT 2019osy. Its nature is unclear, but its location within a galaxy and a rising radio flux made it worth searching for a kilonova event.
20 August 2019
First light of ENGRAVE and a potential NS-BH merger
A few months ago, the hunt for gravitational waves as part of the third observing run (O3) was initiated by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors on April 1, 2019. Both detectors have been upgraded since they were last in operation and have already reported more than 20 gravitational-wave candidate events of either merging binary black holes or merging binary neutron stars.
25 February 2019
AT2017gfo Data Release
ESO’s VLT + X-Shooter observed AT2017gfo nightly for 10 consecutive nights after discovery providing complete spectral coverage from 3300 Angstroms to 2.5 microns. The data were published in the papers Pian et al. 2017, Nature, 551, 67 and Smartt et al. 2017, Nature, 551, 75. The ENGRAVE collaboration have fully reduced all the data in a uniform manner (data reduced by J. Selsing) and spectrophotometrically calibrated to published photometry of AT2017gfo (by J. Gillanders).