PRIME follow-up of Swift J103441.7-571527: No evidence for a variable optical or near-infrared counterpart
ATel #15891; K. De (MIT), I. Andreoni (JSI), D. Buckley (SAAO), S. B. Cenko (NASA/GSFC), J. M. Durbak (UMD), R. Hamada (Osaka U), Y. Hirao (Osaka U), R. Kirikawa (Osaka U), I. Kondo (Osaka U), A. S. Kutyrev (NASA/GSFC), S. Miyazaki (ISAS/JAXA), G. Mosby (NASA/GSFC), T. Sumi (Osaka U), D. Suzuki (Osaka U), E. Troja (U Tor Vergata/ASU), H. Yama (Osaka U)
on 6 Feb 2023; 21:09 UT
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde1@mit.edu)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Optical, X-ray, Cataclysmic Variable, Transient, Variables
We report near-infrared follow-up observations of Swift
J103441.7-571527, a transient X-ray source in the Galactic plane
identified by the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory (ATel #15878).
Observations were carried out with the 1.8m PRIME telescope at SAAO
using the near-infrared prime focus camera and the J filter on UT
2023-01-31, using a set of dithered exposures amounting to a total
exposure time of 140 s. The data were reduced, stacked and calibrated
against the 2MASS catalog using a custom data reduction pipeline. There
is no source detected at the X-ray position to a 5 sigma limiting magnitude
of J > 16.2 Vega mag.
A possible optical counterpart with a brightness of i = 21.64 ± 0.17
mag was reported in optical follow-up observations in ATel #15884.
Further investigation of archival images reveals that the suggested
counterpart is clearly detected in images from the DECaM Galactic Plane
Survey at a magnitude of i = 21.5 ± 0.1 mag, consistent with that
detected in LCO follow-up observations. The PRIME J-band non-detection
is also consistent with the non-detection of the source in archival
2MASS images. As such, the source exhibits no signs of variability
arguing against its association with the X-ray source. Since low mass
X-ray binaries typically show large amplitude optical/IR outbursts
associated with X-ray emission (Corral-Santana et al. 2016), the
non-detection of a transient counterpart argues against a X-ray binary
origin but may be consistent with a magnetic cataclysmic variable,
as suggested in ATel #15878.
These results are based on data obtained from PRIME at the South African
Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), Sutherland, South Africa.
