Palomar Gattini-IR discovery and classification of a young and heavily reddened nova PGIR22gjh
ATel #15348; K. De (MIT), M. Hankins (ATU), 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 25 Apr 2022; 23:53 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Novae
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde1@mit.edu)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Optical, Cataclysmic Variable, Nova
We report the detection and spectroscopic classification of a highly reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR22gjh 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).
PGIR22gjh was first detected in the Gattini data processing pipeline on UT 2022-04-24 at a J magnitude of 9.51 +/- 0.01 AB mag, at J2000 coordinates of
RA 18:08:42.68
Dec -19:21:58.5
corresponding to a Galactic latitude of 0.2 degrees. The transient was not detected on UT 2022-04-18 to a 5 sigma limiting magnitude of J ~ 12.7 mag, suggesting a young transient less than a week old. The source has been reported to the Transient Name Server as AT2022iev. The integrated extinction along this line of sight is ~ 47 mags in g band and ~ 10 mags in J band (Schlafly et al. 2011). There is no source reported at this position in archival 2MASS images. The transient has since brightened to J ~ 9.4 AB mag on UT 2022-04-25.
We obtained an optical spectrum of the source on UT 2022-04-25 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 heavily 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.
