MASTER optical detection of the first LIGO/Virgo neutron stars merging GW170817
astro-ph.HE
/ Authors
V. M. Lipunov, E. Gorbovskoy, V. G. Kornilov, N . Tyurina, P. Balanutsa, A. Kuznetsov, D. Vlasenko, D. Kuvshinov, I. Gorbunov, D. A. H. Buckley
and 23 more authors
A. V. Krylov, R. Podesta, C. Lopez, F. Podesta, H. Levato, C. Saffe, C. Mallamachi, S. Potter, N. M. Budnev, O. Gress, Yu. Ishmuhametova, V. Vladimirov, D. Zimnukhov, V. Yurkov, Yu. Sergienko, A. Gabovich, R. Rebolo, M. Serra-Ricart, G. Israelyan, V. Chazov, Xiaofeng Wang, A. Tlatov, M. I. Panchenko
/ Abstract
Following the reported discovery of the gravitational-wave pulse GW170817/ G298048 by three LIGO/Virgo antennae (Abbott et al., 2017a), the MASTER Global Robotic Net telescopes obtained the first image of the NGC 4993 galaxy after the NS+NS merging. The optical transient MASTER OTJ130948.10-232253.3/SSS17a was later found, which appears to be a kilonova resulting from a merger of two neutron stars. In this paper we report the independent detection and photometry of the kilonova made in white light and in B, V, and R filters. We note that luminosity of the discovered kilonova NGC 4993 is very close to another possible kilonova proposed early GRB 130603 and GRB 080503.