Limits on the Electromagnetic Counterpart to S190814bv

Alan M. Watson, Nathaniel R. Butler, William H. Lee, Rosa L. Becerra, Margarita Pereyra, Fernando Angeles, Alejandro Farah, Liliana Figueroa, Diego González-Buitrago, Fernando Quirós, Jaime Ruíz-Díaz-Soto, Carlos Tejada de Vergas, Silvio J. Tinoco, Tanner Wolfram

Published 2020-01-15Version 1

We derive limits on any electromagnetic counterpart to the compact binary merger S190814bv, whose parameters are consistent with the merger of a black hole and a neutron star. We present observations with the new wide-field optical imager DDOTI and also consider Swift/BAT observations reported by Palmer et al. (2019). We show that Swift/BAT would have detected a counterpart with similar properties to a typical on-axis short GRB at the 98 per cent confidence level, whereas our DDOTI observations only rule out such a counterpart at the 27 per cent confidence level. Neither have sufficient sensitivity to rule out an off-axis counterpart like GW 170817. We compare the efficiency of Swift/BAT and DDOTI for future observations, and show that DDOTI is likely to be about twice as efficient as Swift/BAT for off-axis events up to about 100 Mpc.