JAGWAR
Jansky VLA mapping of Gravitational Wave bursts as Afterglows in Radio
News
Optical Superluminal Motion Measurement in GW170817
Posted 01 Dec 2022: We report on another superluminal motion measurement, at seven times the speed of light, leveraging Hubble Space Telescope precision astrometry and previous radio VLBI data, for GW170817. We thereby obtain a measurement of the Lorentz factor of the wing of the structured jet, as well as substantially improved constraints on the viewing angle (19–25 degrees) and the initial Lorentz factor of the jet core (more than 40). Study presented in Mooley, Anderson & Lu 2022. The panchromatic afterglow data (light curve and proper motion data for GW170817) behind the paper are provided here.
About JAGWAR
The Jansky VLA mapping of Gravitational Wave bursts as Afterglows in Radio (JAGWAR) is a dedicated observing program on the VLA telescope in New Mexico. It is designed to maximize the discovery of the radio counterparts of neutron star mergers detected by terrestrial gravitational-wave observatories (e.g. LIGO). The goals of JAGWAR are 1) to study the material that was ejected during the mergers, 2) map the environments of the mergers, 3) find a population of merger afterglows and study their demographics. Read more.