A redshift for the putative host galaxy of FRB20201124A

ATel #14516; C. D. Kilpatrick, W. Fong (Northwestern University), J. X. Prochaska (UC Santa Cruz), N. Tejos (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso), S. Bhandari (CSIRO), C. K. Day (Swinburne University of Technology)
on 6 Apr 2021; 14:08 UT
Credential Certification: Charles Kilpatrick (cdkilpat@ucsc.edu)

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We report a redshift estimate for FRB20201124A, discovered by the CHIME/FRB Collaboration (ATel #14497) and further detected and localized to arcsecond precision by ASKAP-CRAFT (Kumar et al., ATel #14502; ATel #14508; Day et al., ATel #14515). A putative, catalogued host galaxy, SDSS J050803.48+260338.0 was reported in ATel #14515. We initiated observations of the host galaxy of FRB20201124A with the Binospec optical spectrograph at the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona on 3 April 2021 UT. In 4x600s exposures of the host galaxy, we detect several emission lines, including H-beta, H-alpha, [N II], and [S II] at a common redshift of z=0.098+/-0.002, in agreement with photometric redshift estimates from SDSS and Pan-STARRS. We consider this to be the redshift of FRB20201124A. We thank the MMT Observatory staff, in particular Benjamin Weiner and Skyler Self for scheduling and executing these observations.