Using galaxy formation simulations to optimize LIGO follow-up observations
The recent discovery of gravitational radiation from merging black holesposes a challenge of how to organize the electromagnetic follow-up ofgravitational-wave events as well as observed bursts of neutrinos. Wepropose a technique to select the galaxies that are most likely to hostthe event given some assumptions of whether the particular event isassociated with recent star formation, low-metallicity stars or simplyproportional to the total stellar mass in the galaxy. We combine datafrom the 2-MASS Photometric Redshift Galaxy Catalogue with results fromgalaxy formation simulations to develop observing strategies thatpotentially reduce the area of sky to search by up to a factor of 2relative to an unweighted search of galaxies, and a factor of 20 to asearch over the entire LIGO localization region.