Abstract
The merger of two dense stellar remnants including at least one neutron star is predicted to produce gravitational waves (GWs) and short-duration gamma ray bursts1,2. In the process, neutron-rich material is ejected from the system and heavy elements are synthesized by r-process nucleosynthesis1,3. The radioactive decay of these heavy elements produces additional transient radiation termed kilonova or macronova4,5,6,7,8,9,10. We report the detection of linear optical polarization, P = (0.50 ± 0.07)%, 1.46 days after detection of the GWs from GW 170817—a double neutron star merger associated with an optical macronova counterpart and a short gamma ray burst11,12,13,14. The optical emission from a macronova is expected to be characterized by a blue, rapidly decaying component and a red, more slowly evolving component due to material rich in heavy elements—the lanthanides15. The polarization measurement was made when the macronova was still in its blue phase, during which there was an important contribution from a lanthanide-free outflow. The low degree of polarization is consistent with intrinsically unpolarized emission scattered by galactic dust, suggesting a symmetric geometry of the emitting region and low inclination of the merger system. Stringent upper limits to the polarization degree from 2.45–9.48 days post-burst are consistent with the lanthanides-rich macronova interpretation.
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Change history
30 October 2017
In the version of this Letter originally published, in the third paragraph of the text Kyutoku et al. were not correctly cited and the sentence should have read: “As pointed out by Kyutoku at al.28, in the case of high optical depth to electron scattering (~1) and assuming spectral lines do not significantly depolarize the global emission, the linear polarization observed from the equatorial plane could be as high as a few per cent.” Also, in the Author contributions section, the final sentence should have read: “C.G.M. contributed to the writing of the paper.”
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Acknowledgements
This study was based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under European Southern Observatory programme 099.D-0116. We thank the European Southern Observatory—Paranal staff for carrying out excellent observations under difficult conditions during a hectic period. We also acknowledge partial funding from Agenzia Spaziale Italiana-Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica grant I/004/11/3. K.W., A.B.H., R.L.C.S. and N.R.T. acknowledge funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. J.H. was supported by a VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grant (project number 16599). Y.Z.F. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 11525313. C.G.M. acknowledges support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. K.T. was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science grant 15H05437 and a Japan Science and Technology Consortia grant. J.M. acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China 11673062 and the Major Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(KJZD-EW-M06).
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All authors contributed to the work presented in this paper. S.C. and K.W. coordinated the data acquisition, analysed the data and wrote the paper. A.B.H., A.M., P.D., E.P. and N.T. contributed to the data analysis. Y.F. and K.T. contributed to the theoretical discussion. C.G.M. contributed to the writing of the paper.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0319-6.
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Covino, S., Wiersema, K., Fan, Y.Z. et al. The unpolarized macronova associated with the gravitational wave event GW 170817. Nat Astron 1, 791–794 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0285-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0285-z
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