SkyMapper Optical Follow-up of Gravitational Wave Triggers: Overview of Alert Science Data Pipeline (AlertSDP)

SkyMapper is the largest-aperture optical wide-field telescope in Australia and can be used for transient detection in the Southern sky. Reference images from its Southern Survey cover the sky at δ <+10 deg to a depth of I ~ 20 mag. It has been used for surveys of extragalactic transients such as supernovae, optical counterparts to gravitational-wave (GW) and fast radio bursts. We adopt an ensemble-based machine learning technique and further filtering scheme that provides high completeness ~98% and purity ~91% across a wide magnitude range. Here we present an important use-case of our robotic transient search, which is the follow-up of GW event triggers from LIGO/Virgo. We discuss the facility's performance in the case of the second binary neutron star merger GW190425. In time for the LIGO/Virgo O4 run, we will have deeper reference images for galaxies within out to ~200 Mpc distance, allowing rapid transient detection to i ~ 21 mag.