MeerKAT observations of the nearby Type Ia supernova SN2019np
ATel #12416; I. Heywood (Oxford/Rhodes), A. Horesh (HUJI), A. J. van der Horst (GWU), P. A. Woudt (UCT), R. P. Fender (Oxford/UCT), M. Perez-Torres (IAA-CSIC, Granada), and L. Chomiuk (Michigan St) report on behalf of the ThunderKAT collaboration
on 22 Jan 2019; 21:29 UT
Credential Certification: Assaf Horesh (assafh@mail.huji.ac.il)
Subjects: Radio, Supernovae, Transient
We observed the position of the nearby Type Ia supernova SN2019np (discovered by Itagaki, TNS discovery report #28550; classified by Burke, TNS classification report #3399) with the new MeerKAT telescope. MeerKAT observed SN2019np for a total of 3.25 hours, commencing at 23:15:47.5 (UTC) on 2019 Jan 11. The frequency coverage was 856 - 1690 MHz. Bandpass and flux scale corrections were derived from scans of the flux calibrator 3C286, and time-dependent gain corrections were derived from scans of the nearby calibrator J1120+1420, and later refined via phase-only self-calibration of the target field. For the final image, a Briggs' robust weighting of -1.5 was used in order to suppress the diffuse radio emission associated with the host galaxy of the supernova. The observation resulted in a non-detection with an RMS noise level in the tapered image at the position of the supernova of 19 uJy/beam. We, therefore, place a 3-sigma upper-limit on the emission from SN2019np of 57 uJy/beam at 1280 MHz.
We would like to thank the staff at the South African Radio Astronomy
Observatory (SARAO) for scheduling and obtaining these observations.