A Case Study of On-the-Fly Wide-Field Radio Imaging Applied to the Gravitational-wave Event GW 151226

We apply a newly-developed On-the-Fly mosaicing technique on the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at 3 GHz in order to carry out a sensitive search for an afterglow from the Advanced LIGO binary black hole merger event GW 151226. In three epochs between 1.5 and 6 months post-merger we observed a 100 sq. deg region, with more than 80% of the survey region having a RMS sensitivity of better than 150 uJy/beam, in the northern hemisphere having a merger containment probability of 10%. The data were processed in near-real-time, and analyzed to search for transients and variables. No transients were found but we have demonstrated the ability to conduct blind searches in a time-frequency phase space where the predicted afterglow signals are strongest. If the gravitational wave event is contained within our survey region, the upper limit on any late-time radio afterglow from the merger event at an assumed mean distance of 440 Mpc is about 1e29 erg/s/Hz. Approximately 1.5% of the radio sources in the field showed variability at a level of 30%, and can be attributed to normal activity from active galactic nuclei. The low rate of false positives in the radio sky suggests that wide-field imaging searches at a few Gigahertz can be an efficient and competitive search strategy. We discuss our search method in the context of the recent afterglow detection from GW 170817 and radio follow-up in future gravitational wave observing runs.