Palomar Gattini-IR NIR detection and classification of a young, highly reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR21git / AT2021aadi / Gaia21ejq
ATel #14950; K. De (MIT), M. Hankins (ATU), L. Hillenbrand (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 3 Oct 2021; 15:30 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Novae
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde@astro.caltech.edu)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Cataclysmic Variable, Nova, Transient
Referred to by ATel #: 14958
We report the detection and spectroscopic classification of a highly
reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR21git by the Palomar Gattini-IR
survey (De et al. 2020, Moore & Kasliwal 2019). The source was
identified as part of a dedicated filter to search for large amplitude
Galactic plane transients (De et al. 2021).
PGIR21git was first detected in the Gattini data processing pipeline
on UT 2021-09-19 at a J magnitude of 12.83 +/- 0.27 AB mag, at J2000
coordinates of
RA 18:00:44.85
Dec -21:39:41.46
corresponding to a Galactic latitude of 0.7 degrees. The transient was
not detected on UT 2021-09-17 to a 5 sigma limiting magnitude of J ~
12.4 mag. The source was also reported to the Transient Name Server as
AT 2021aadi by Gaia as Gaia 21ejq, who detected the source on
2021-09-20. The integrated extinction along this line of sight is ~ 15
mags in g band and ~ 4 mags in J band (Schlafly et al. 2011). There is
no source reported at this position in archival 2MASS images. The
source has subsequently brightened to J ~ 10.8 mag on UT 2021-10-03.
We obtained an optical spectrum of the source on UT 2021-10-03 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, O I and Ca II,
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 young nova.
