Palomar Gattini-IR NIR detection and classification of a highly reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR20duo / AT2020kvq / MASTER OTJ184353.33+000350.9

ATel #13817; K. De (Caltech), M. Hankins (Caltech), M. M. Kasliwal (Caltech), J. Sokoloski (Columbia), M. Ashley (UNSW), A. Babul (Columbia), V. Karambelkar (Caltech), 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 19 Jun 2020; 05:30 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Transients
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde@astro.caltech.edu)

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We report the detection and spectroscopic classification of a highly reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR20duo by the Palomar Gattini-IR survey (De et al. 2020, Moore & Kasliwal 2019). Palomar Gattini-IR is a wide-field NIR transient survey scanning the entire Northern sky in J band to a median depth of 15.7 AB mag every two nights.

PGIR20duo was first detected in the Gattini data processing pipeline on UT 2020-05-12 at a J magnitude of 11.24 +/- 0.03 AB mag, at J2000 coordinates of

RA 18:43:53.4
Dec 00:03:51.7

corresponding to a Galactic latitude of 1.7 degrees. The first observation was after a seasonal gap, with the last non-detection on 2020-02-16 to a depth of 13.7 AB mag. The source was also reported to the Transient Name Server as AT 2020kvq by MASTER (Lipunov et al. 2010; as MASTER OTJ184353.33+000350.9), who detected the source on 2020-05-21. The integrated extinction along this line of sight is ~ 10 mags in g band, ~ 7 mags in r band and ~ 2 mags in J band (Schlafly et al. 2011). There is no source reported at this position in archival 2MASS images. The source has been subsequently fading to a AB magnitude of 12.70 +/- 0.07 on UT 2020-06-18.

We obtained an optical spectrum of the source on UT 2020-06-19 using the SED Machine spectrograph (Blagorodnova et al. 2018) on the Palomar 60-inch telescope. The spectrum shows a highly reddened continuum with broad unresolved emission lines of the Balmer series and OI, consistent with a reddened classical nova in the Galactic plane.

Further follow-up observations are underway and we encourage multi-wavelength follow-up observations of the source.