VVV near-IR observations of the X-ray transient Swift J174038.1-273712
ATel #14626; T. S. Ferreira, R. K. Saito (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), D. Minniti (Universidad Andres Bello, Vatican Observatory)
on 14 May 2021; 13:45 UT
Credential Certification: Roberto Saito (saito@astro.ufsc.br)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Transient
Following the discovery of the new X-ray transient Swift J174038.1-273712 by Bahramian et al. (2021, ATel #14536) and later observations by Sanna et al. (2021, ATel #14545), Sandoval et al. (2021, ATel #14550) and Sguera et al. (2021, ATel #14552), we explored archival near-IR (NIR) images from the VVV Survey (vvvsurvey.org; Minniti et al. 2010, New Astron., 15, 433) of the Galactic bulge within the area containing the reported object.
A single source with flag "+1" (non-stellar source) was detected within to 2 arcsecond radius from the target position of Bahramian et al. (2021, ATel #14536) at coordinates:
RA (J2000): +265.1590823
DEC (J2000): -27.6199402
and presenting the following NIR magnitudes (yyyy-mm-dd):
Z: 16.14+/-0.01 (2011-08-26)
Y: 15.33+/-0.01 (2011-08-26)
J: 14.32+/-0.01 (2010-04-09)
H: 13.19+/-0.01 (2010-04-09)
Ks: 12.76+/-0.01 (2013-08-13)
A search for variability in the NIR data of Swift J174038.1-273712, using Lomb-Scargle (LS; Lomb 1976, Ap&SS 39; Scargle 1982, ApJ 1:263) and Phase Dispersion Minimisation methods (PDM, Stellingwerf 1978, Astrophysical. J. v224) across 51 VVV-DR4 Ks-band epochs over about three years of observations (from April 2010 to September 2013), showed no significant periodic signal within the range 0.1 to 5.0 days.
