GW190814 observations taken with MeerLICHT

A large number of electromagnetic facilities conducted follow-up campaigns in the search for a possible counterpart to the gravitational wave event, which was made especially promising given the early source classification of a neutron star-black hole merger. We present the results of the GW follow-up campaign taken with the wide-field optical telescope MeerLICHT, located at the South African Astronomical Observatory Sutherland site.

We use our results to constrain possible kilonova models. MeerLICHT observed more than 95% of the probability localisation each night for over a week in three optical bands (u,q,i) with our initial observations beginning almost 2 hours after the GW detection. We describe the search for new transients in MeerLICHT data and investigate how our limiting magnitudes can be used to constrain an AT2017gfo-like kilonova.