AMI-LA radio detection of AT2019wey
ATel #16218; Lauren Rhodes (Oxford), Rob Fender (Oxford), Dave Green (Cambridge), David Titterington (Cambridge)
on 29 Aug 2023; 18:25 UT
Credential Certification: Lauren Rhodes (laurenelizabethrhodes95@gmail.com)
Subjects: Radio, Black Hole, Neutron Star, Transient
Referred to by ATel #: 16276
We observed the field of the candidate black hole X-ray binary AT2019wey (Tonry et al 2019, TNSTR 2553) with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager - Large Array (AMI-LA) for 4 hours on the 2023-08-26, with a central frequency of 15.5 GHz. A point source is detected in the AMI-LA image at RA = 04:35:23.22+/-0.03s, Dec = +55:22:37.7+/-0.6arcsec, consistent with the reported position of AT2019wey. The source is detected at a flux density of 3.4 +/- 0.2 mJy.
Past radio observations of AT2019wey have been performed at 6.7GHz with the VLA (Yao et al, 2019), with the EVN (Cao et al, 2022). The resulting publications reported a peak flux density of ~2.5mJy, indicating that the source may be in its most luminous radio state to date. This could potentially be a flare associated with the recent softening of the X-ray spectrum (Atel #16197).
We plan to perform follow-up observations with the AMI-LA and encourage further high-cadence multi-frequency radio observations with other facilities.
We thank the staff of MRAO for scheduling and performing this observation.