Palomar Gattini-IR discovery and classification of the bright NIR transient PGIR20eig/AT2020qpq as a highly reddened Galactic nova

ATel #13914; 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 2 Aug 2020; 14:11 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 PGIR20eig/AT2020qpq 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.

PGIR20eig was first detected in the Gattini data processing pipeline on UT 2020-07-13 at a J magnitude of 13.35 +/- 0.22 AB mag, at J2000 coordinates of
RA 19:14:26.3
Dec +14:44:40.0
corresponding to a Galactic latitude of 1.7 degrees. No source was detected on UT 2020-07-11 to a depth of 13.7 AB mag. The integrated extinction along this line of sight is ~ 7 mags in g band, ~ 5 mags in r band and ~ 1.5 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 rising to a magnitude of 12.55 +/- 0.11 on UT 2020-07-31.

We obtained an optical spectrum of the source on UT 2020-08-02 using the SED Machine spectrograph (Blagorodnova et al. 2018) on the Palomar 60-inch telescope. The spectrum shows a red continuum together with broad unresolved emission lines of the Balmer series and O I, 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.