Suchergebnisse

U.S. Department of Energy ; U.S. National Science Foundation ; Ministry of Science and Education of Spain ; Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom ; Higher Education Funding Council for England ; National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago ; Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University ; Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas AM University ; Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) ; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) ; Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao ; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; Argonne National Laboratory ; University of California at Santa Cruz ; University of Cambridge ; Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid ; University of Chicago ; University College London ; DES-Brazil Consortium ; University of Edinburgh ; Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich ; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC) ; Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies ; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ; Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen ; associated Excellence Cluster Universe ; University of Michigan ; National Optical Astronomy Observatory ; University of Nottingham ; Ohio State University ; University of Pennsylvania ; University of Portsmouth ; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory ; Stanford University ; University of Sussex ; Texas AM University ; National Science Foundation ; MINECO ; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa ; European Research Council under the European Union, ERC ; NSF ; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) ; ICREA ; National Science Foundation: AST-1138766 ; MINECO: AYA2012-39559 ; MINECO: ESP2013-48274 ; MINECO: FPA2013-47986 ; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa: SEV-2012-0234 ; European Research Council under the European Union, ERC: 240672 ; European Research Council under the European Union, ERC: 291329 ; European Research Council under the European Union, ERC: 306478 ; NSF: AST-1518052 ; Processo FAPESP: 2015/12338-1 ; The collapse of a stellar core is expected to produce gravitational waves (GWs), neutrinos, and in most cases a luminous supernova. Sometimes, however, the optical event could be significantly less luminous than a supernova and a direct collapse to a black hole, where the star just disappears, is possible. The GW event GW150914 was detected by the LIGO Virgo Collaboration via a burst analysis that gave localization contours enclosing the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Shortly thereafter, we used DECam to observe 102 deg(2) of the localization area, including 38 deg(2) on the LMC for a missing supergiant search. We construct a complete catalog of LMC luminous red supergiants, the best candidates to undergo invisible core collapse, and collected catalogs of other candidates: less luminous red supergiants, yellow supergiants, blue supergiants, luminous blue variable stars, and Wolf-Rayet stars. Of the objects in the imaging region, all are recovered in the images. The timescale for stellar disappearance is set by the free-fall time, which is a function of the stellar radius. Our observations at 4 and 13 days after the event result in a search sensitive to objects of up to about 200 solar radii. We conclude that it is unlikely that GW150914 was caused by the core collapse of a relatively compact supergiant in the LMC, consistent with the LIGO Collaboration analyses of the gravitational waveform as best interpreted as a high mass binary black hole merger. We discuss how to generalize this search for future very nearby core-collapse candidates.