Swift follow-up observations of the flaring QSO Gaia19bsj
ATel #12832; S. Komossa (MPIfR), D. Grupe (Morehead State Univ.), M. Parker (ESAC)
on 1 Jun 2019; 21:59 UT
Credential Certification: St. Komossa (stefanie.komossa@gmx.de)
Subjects: Optical, Ultra-Violet, X-ray, AGN, Blazar, Quasar
We report follow-up observations with the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory of the flaring QSO Gaia19bsj (AT 2019evq). An outburst by 2.6 mag was discovered by Gaia (Delgado et al., http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/alert/Gaia1 bsj/) on 2019-05-08. Swift observations were carried out on 2019-05-19 01:30 UT (MJD 58622.06) in the X-ray band with 1.9 ksec exposure time and in all optical-UV filters. We determined an (absorbed) 0.3-10 keV X-ray flux of 4.2 x 10^-13 ergs/cm^2/s , and a photon index of Gamma_x = 2.0 +-0.4. Â Â The Swift UVOT Vega magnitudes on May 19 were V =Â 18.54+-0.28(18.17), B = 19.56+-0.27(19.08), U =18.57+-0.19(17.97), UVW1 = 18.97+-0.21(18.21), UVM2 = 18.92+-0.20(17.83), and UVW2 = 19.49+-0.20(18.58). Values are uncorrected (corrected) for Galactic extinction. This QSO is at redshift of z=1.3 (Nicholl et al., ATel #12757). Given its bright radio emission (e.g., Becker et al. 1987), it is very like a blazar.
We would like to thank Brad Cenko for approving the ToO request and the Swift team
for executing our observations.
