TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 27184 SUBJECT: LIGO/Virgo S200224ca: Identification of a GW compact binary merger candidate The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration DATE: 20/02/24 22:53:00 GMT FROM: Vinaya Valsan at U. of Wisconsin Milwaukee We identified the compact binary merger candidate S200224ca during real-time processing of data from LIGO Hanford Observatory (H1),LIGO Livingston Observatory (L1), and Virgo Observatory (V1) at 2020-02-24 22:22:34.406 UTC (GPS time: 1266618172.406). The candidate was found by the PyCBC Live [1], CWB [2], GstLAL [3], MBTAOnline [4] ,and SPIIR [5] analysis pipelines. S200224ca is an event of interest because its false alarm rate, as estimated by the online analysis, is 1.6e-11 Hz, or about one in 1e3 years. The event's properties can be found at this URL: https://gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/S200224ca The classification of the GW signal, in order of descending probability, is BBH (>99%), Terrestrial (<1%), BNS (<1%), NSBH (<1%), or MassGap (<1%). Assuming the candidate is astrophysical in origin, the probability that the lighter compact object has a mass < 3 solar masses (HasNS) is <1%. Using the masses and spins inferred from the signal, the probability of matter outside the final compact object (HasRemnant) is <1%. Two sky maps are available at this time and can be retrieved from the GraceDB event page: * bayestar.fits.gz,0, an initial localization generated by BAYESTAR [6], distributed via GCN notice about 3 minutes after the candidate event time. * bayestar.fits.gz,1, an initial localization generated by BAYESTAR [6], distributed via GCN notice about 10 minutes after the candidate event time. The preferred sky map at this time is bayestar.fits.gz,1. For the bayestar.fits.gz,1 sky map, the 90% credible region is well fit by an ellipse with an area of 73 deg2 described by the following DS9 region (right ascension, declination, semi-major axis, semi-minor axis, position angle of the semi-minor axis): icrs; ellipse(11h38m42s, -09d20m21s, 9d, 3d, 68d) Marginalized over the whole sky, the a posteriori luminosity distance estimate is 1585 +/- 331 Mpc (a posteriori mean +/- standard deviation). For further information about analysis methodology and the contents of this alert, refer to the LIGO/Virgo Public Alerts User Guide . [1] Nitz et al. PRD 98, 024050 (2018) [2] Klimenko et al. PRD 93, 042004 (2016) [3] Messick et al. PRD 95, 042001 (2017) [4] Adams et al. CQG 33, 175012 (2016) [5] Qi Chu, PhD Thesis, The University of Western Australia (2017) [6] Singer & Price PRD 93, 024013 (2016) [7] Singer & Price PRD 93, 024013 (2016)