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).
05 December 2018
ENGRAVEr's mind under pressure - Dry run before Christmas
The ENGRAVE collaboration finished their first dry run in preparation for the LIGO/VIRGO engineering run ER13 starting on 14 December. With new gravitational wave detections on the horizon four ENGRAVE operations teams tested for the first time telescope triggers, data reduction step-by-step procedure and their observation strategies and capabilities. We would like to thank all participants for their efforts!
28 August 2018
ENGRAVE collaboration meeting
The first ENGRAVE all-hands meeting was held on 31st October 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching. Thanks to our hosts Ting-Wan Chen, Tassilo Schweyer, Jan Bolmer for organising and Prof Kirpal Nandra for his generous support of the meeting. More details for participants are on our wiki