THCA members participate in Insight-HXMT obs of GW170817
On Oct. 16th 2017 Beijing Time, the National Science Foundation of the United States (NSF) announced at a news conference the discovery of a binary neutron star coalescence event (designated GW170817) through gravitational waves detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) together with the Advanced Virgo interferometer. This historic event triggered a rare, global joint observational campaign with dozens of astronomical equipment at all wavelengths in search of the elusive electromagnetic counterparts. Insight-HXMT, the first X-ray Satellite of China launched on Jun. 15th 2017, which is still under test, observed GW170817.
Only four high-energy telescopes successfully monitored the position error boxes constrained by the LIGO-Virgo detectors following the GW170817 event. Insight-HXMT, with the largest collecting area and microsecond time resolution in the 0.2-5 MeV range, had the best capability in detecting gamma-rays in this energy range, thus provided a stringent constraint for the properties of the electromagnetic radiation from this binary neutron star merger.
A paper (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/pdf) entitled "Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger", published in the "Astrophysical Journal Letters" on Oct. 20th 2017, reported the results from Insight-HXMT observations in a whole paragraph and listed "The Insight-HXMT Collaboration" as one of the collaborations owing to the significance of the Insight-HXMT results. Furthermore, a detailed analysis on the results observed by Insight-HXMT has been published in the online version of the journal "SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy" as an independent article (http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCPMA/61/3/10.1007/s11433-017-9107-5?slug=full%20text). A number of team members from the Department of Physics (including members from the THCA) and the Department of Engineering Physics of Tsinghua University are listed as co-authors in the two aforementioned papers.