TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 41204 SUBJECT: LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S250726ak: Upper limits from Swift/BAT-GUANO DATE: 25/07/30 17:57:00 GMT FROM: Maia Williams at PSU mjw6837@psu.edu
Maia Williams (PSU), Samuele Ronchini (PSU), Gayathri Raman, James DeLaunay (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Aaron Tohuvavohu (Caltech) report:
Swift/BAT was observing 99.9% of the GW localization probability ([Bilby.multiorder.fits](https://gracedb.ligo.org/api/superevents/S250726ak/files/Bilby.multiorder.fi...)) at merger time. A fraction 40.74% of the GW localization posterior is contained inside the BAT coded FoV.
The LVK notice, distributed in near real-time, triggered the Swift Mission Operations Center operated Gamma-ray Urgent Archiver for Novel Opportunities (GUANO; [Tohuvavohu et al. 2020, ApJ, 900, 1](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aba94f)).
Upon trigger by this notice, GUANO sent a command to the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) to save 200 seconds of BAT event-mode data from [-50,+150] seconds around the time of the burst. All the requested event mode data was delivered to the ground.
Using the NITRATES analysis ([DeLaunay + Tohuvavohu 2022, ApJ, 941, 169](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac9d38)), we searched for emission on 8 timescales from 0.128s to 16.384s in the interval [-20,+20] seconds around the merger time. We find no evidence for a signal, and derive the following upper limits.
We quote the 5-sigma flux upper limits in the 15-350 keV band, weighted over the GW localization, for four spectral templates (soft, normal, and hard GRB-like templates described in [arXiv:1612.02395], and spectral shape from GRB170817A [arXiv:1710.05446]) and for four time bins. In units of 10^-7 erg/s/cm^2:
|time_bin (s) |soft |normal|hard |GRB170817 |-|-|-|-|-| |0.256 |12.10 |7.77 |6.83 |8.74 |1.024 |6.19 |3.97 |3.49 |4.46 |4.096 |3.34 |2.15 |1.89 |2.41 |16.384 |2.10 |1.35 |1.18 |1.51
The upper limits as function of sky position are plotted here, alongside the GW localization: https://zenodo.org/records/16614782
The solid and dashed lines indicate the 90% and 50% GW contour levels, respectively. The corresponding fits file is also included.
GUANO is a fully autonomous, extremely low latency, spacecraft commanding pipeline designed for targeted recovery of BAT event mode data around the times of compelling astrophysical events to enable more sensitive GRB searches.
A live reporting of Swift/BAT event data recovered by GUANO can be found at: https://www.swift.psu.edu/guano/
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