- Kasliwal, MM
- Cenko, SB
- Singer, LP
- Corsi, A
- Cao, Y
- Barlow, T
- Bhalerao, V
- Bellm, E
- Cook, D
- Duggan, GE
- Ferretti, R
- Frail, DA
- Horesh, A
- Kendrick, R
- Kulkarni, SR
- Lunnan, R
- Palliyaguru, N
- Laher, R
- Masci, F
- Manulis, I
- Miller, AA
- Nugent, PE
- Perley, D
- Prince, TA
- Quimby, RM
- Rana, J
- Rebbapragada, U
- Sesar, B
- Singhal, A
- Surace, J
- Sistine, AV
- et al.
© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) autonomously responded to and promptly tiled the error region of the first gravitational-wave event GW150914 to search for an optical counterpart. Only a small fraction of the total localized region was immediately visible in the northern night sky, due both to Sun-angle and elevation constraints. Here, we report on the transient candidates identified and rapid follow-up undertaken to determine the nature of each candidate. Even in the small area imaged of 126 deg2, after extensive filtering, eight candidates were deemed worthy of additional follow-up. Within two hours, all eight were spectroscopically classified by the Keck II telescope. Curiously, even though such events are rare, one of our candidates was a superluminous supernova. We obtained radio data with the Jansky Very Large Array and X-ray follow-up with the Swift satellite for this transient. None of our candidates appear to be associated with the gravitational-wave trigger, which is unsurprising given that GW150914 came from the merger of two stellar-mass black holes. This end-to-end discovery and follow-up campaign bodes well for future searches in this post-detection era of gravitational waves.