Palomar Gattini-IR NIR discovery and classification of a highly reddened galactic classical nova PGIR19brv / AT2019qwf

ATel #13130; K. De (Caltech), M. Hankins (Caltech), M. M. Kasliwal (Caltech), J. Sokoloski (Columbia), M. Ashley (UNSW), A. Babul (Columbia), R. M. Lau (ISAS/JAXA), A. Moore (ANU), E. O. Ofek (Weizmann), M. Sharma (Columbia), J. Soon (ANU), R. Soria (NAOC), T. Travouillon (ANU) on behalf of the Palomar Gattini-IR team
on 25 Sep 2019; 06:39 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Novae
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde@astro.caltech.edu)

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We report the discovery and classification of a bright NIR transient found in regular survey operations of Palomar Gattini-IR. Palomar Gattini-IR is a wide-field NIR survey scanning the entire northern sky down to a depth of 16 AB mag every two nights (Moore & Kasliwal 2019).

PGIR 19brv (AT 2019qwf) was found as a candidate transient generated in the real-time data reduction pipeline of Palomar Gattini-IR (De et al. in prep) at a J band mag of 11.3 +/- 0.02 mag (all reported magnitudes are in the Vega system) on UT 2019-09-17.25 and at J2000 coordinates

RA: 21:09:25.52
Dec: +48:10:51.9

The source was not detected to a 5 sigma depth of 13.8 mag on UT 2019-09-14.27. There is no source at the position of the transient in archival 2MASS images. The transient is at a galactic latitude of 0.2 degrees, with a corresponding integrated line of sight extinction of 14.6 mags in g-band and 3.1 mags in J band (Schalfly et al. 2011). Subsequent detections of the source indicate a steady rise to a magnitude of 10.6 +/- 0.01 mag on UT 2019-09-24.26.

We obtained an optical spectrum of the source with the SED Machine (Blagorodnova et al. 2018) on the Palomar 60-inch telescope. The spectrum shows a red continuum from 4500 A to 9000 A, superimposed with broad emission lines of H alpha, H beta and O I at z = 0, classifying this source as a reddened galactic classical nova. Further follow-up is underway and multi-wavelength observations are encouraged.