Palomar Gattini-IR discovery and classification of a young and heavily reddened nova PGIR23abmath
ATel #15993; M. Kong (Caltech), 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 19 Apr 2023; 03:24 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Novae
Credential Certification: Kishalay De (kde1@mit.edu)
Subjects: Cataclysmic Variable, Nova, Transient
Referred to by ATel #: 15997
We report the detection and spectroscopic classification of a highly reddened Galactic classical nova PGIR23abmath. The transient was identified in regular survey operations of Palomar Gattini-IR (De et al. 2020; Moore & Kasliwal 2019).
PGIR23abmath was first detected in the Gattini data processing pipeline on UT 2023-04-12 at a J magnitude of 11.655 +/- 0.068 AB mag, at J2000 coordinates of
RA 19:10:19.19
Dec 10:32:21.24
corresponding to a Galactic latitude of 0.65 degrees. The transient was not detected on UT 2023-04-09 to a 5 sigma limiting magnitude of J ~ 13.22 mag, pointing to a young transient less than a week old. The source has been reported to the Transient Name Server as AT2023gde. The integrated extinction along this line of sight is ~ 24.4 mags in g band and ~ 5.3 mags in J band (Schlafly et al. 2011). There is no source reported at corresponding coordinates in archival 2MASS images. The transient has since brightened to J ~ 9.48 AB mag on UT 2023-04-15.
We obtained an optical spectrum of the source on UT 2023-04-15 using the SED Machine spectrograph (Blagorodnova et al. 2018) on the Palomar 60-inch telescope, and another on UT 2023-04-16 using the Double Spectrograph (Oke & Gunn 1982). on the Palomar 200-inch telescope. The spectrum shows broad emission lines of the Balmer series, O I and Ca II, while the H alpha line shows a P-Cygni profile with a weak absorption component at a velocity of ~ 1400 km/s. The overall photometric and spectroscopic characteristics are consistent with a highly reddened classical nova.
Further follow-up observations are underway and we encourage multi-wavelength follow-up observations of the young nova.
