ADASSX

The era of gravitational wave (GW) astronomy has yielded many ground-breaking discoveries in astrophysics, where some of the most exciting revelations are only possible when the electromagnetic counterpart or host galaxy is also identified. However, there has been only one such counterpart found to date, GW170817, leaving a large gap in our understanding of compact merger events and their population statistics. In this talk, I will describe how the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) gravitational wave follow-up (NED-GWF) service assists in the searches for counterparts to GW events. This service provides lists of host-galaxy candidates in event volumes and makes them publicly available on the website (and via an API) within minutes of an alert. We have also published an analysis of a subset of NED galaxies with distances out to 1000 Mpc, the local volume sample (NED-LVS), where we have performed additional vetting of objects, characterized the sample properties, derived prioritization metrics, and quantified the completeness. NED-LVS is updated regularly as new measurements are ingested into the NED database, and it is publicly available for download at the website. We are now exploring additional capabilities to support the searches for other multi-messenger events.