Search for Coincident Gravitational Waves and Long Gamma-Ray Bursts from 4-OGC and the Fermi-GBM/Swift-BAT Catalog

Abstract

The recent discovery of a kilonova associated with an apparent long-duration gamma-ray burst has challenged the typical classification that long gamma-ray bursts originate from the core collapse of massive stars and short gamma-ray bursts are from compact binary coalescence. The kilonova indicates a neutron star merger origin and suggests the viability of gravitational-wave and long gamma-ray burst multimessenger astronomy. Gravitational waves play a crucial role by providing independent information for the source properties. This work revisits the archival 2015–2020 LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave candidates from the 4-OGC catalog that are consistent with a binary neutron star or neutron star–black hole merger and the long-duration gamma-ray bursts from the Fermi-GBM and Swift-BAT catalogs. We search for spatial and temporal coincidence with up to a 10 s time lag between gravitational-wave candidates and the onset of long-duration gamma-ray bursts. The most significant candidate association has only a false-alarm rate of once every 2 yr; given the LIGO/Virgo observational period, this is consistent with a null result. We report an exclusion distance for each search candidate for a fiducial gravitational-wave signal with conservative viewing angle assumptions.