GWOPS: A VO-technology Driven Tool to Search for the Electromagnetic Counterpart of Gravitational Wave Event

The search and follow-up observation of electromagnetic (EM) counterparts of gravitational waves (GW) is a current hot topic of GW cosmology. Due to the limitation of the accuracy of the GW observation facility at this stage, we can only get a rough sky-localization region for the GW event, and the typical area of the region is between 200 and 1500 square degrees. Since GW events occur in or near galaxies, limiting the observation target to galaxies can significantly speedup searching for EM counterparts. Therefore, how to efficiently select host galaxy candidates in such a large GW localization region, how to arrange the observation sequence, and how to efficiently identify the GW source from observational data are the problems that need to be solved. International Virtual Observatory Alliance has developed a series of technical standards for data retrieval, interoperability and visualization. Based on the application of VO technologies, we construct the GW follow-up Observation Planning System (GWOPS). It consists of three parts: a pipeline to select host candidates of GW and sort their priorities for follow-up observation, an identification module to find the transient from follow-up observation data, and a visualization module to display GW-related data. GWOPS can rapidly respond to GW events. With GWOPS, the operations such as follow-up observation planning, data storage, data visualization, and transient identification can be efficiently coordinated, which will promote the success searching rate for GWs EM counterparts.