Palomar Gattini-IR early detection of the young and bright Galactic nova candidate AT2020urz / BraTS-SON-T2-020 / PGIR20evr
ATel #14062; 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 4 Oct 2020; 08:18 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Novae
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde@astro.caltech.edu)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Optical, Cataclysmic Variable, Nova, Transient
We report early detection and strong explosion time constraints of the
young and bright Galactic nova candidate AT2020urz / BraTS-SON-T2-020
/ PGIR20evr from the Palomar Gattini-IR NIR survey (De et al. 2020;
Moore & Kasliwal 2019).
The source PGIR20evr was first detected on UT 2020-10-02 02:38 as part of a 1-day cadence survey of the northern Galactic plane, at J2000 coordinates
RA 17:54:59.98
Dec -21:22:41.30
at a magnitude of J = 11.46 +/- 0.05 AB mag. No source was detected at
the location on 2020-10-01 02:35 to a 5 sigma limit of J = 13.3 AB mag,
constraining the explosion to be
currently less than 3 days old. The source was detected by the BraTS
survey on 2020-10-02 23:31 and reported to the Transient Name Server as AT2020urz.
The object has currently brightened to a J = 8.34 +/- 0.01 on UT
2020-10-04 02:25.
Given the young age of the brightening nova candidate, we
encourage rapid photometry, spectroscopy and multi-wavelength
follow-up.
