PRIME discovery of a heavily reddened classical nova PRIME24aadwvh at the Galactic center
ATel #16824; R. Hamada (Osaka U), K. De (MIT), D. Suzuki (Osaka U), N. Koshimoto (Osaka U), A. Idei (Osaka U), K. Nunota (Osaka U), N. Hamasaki (Osaka U), M. Masterson (MIT), E. Kara (MIT), J. Durbak (UMD), G. Mosby (NASA/GSFC), A. Kutyrev (NASA/GSFC), T. Sumi (Osaka U)
on 21 Sep 2024; 00:52 UT
Credential Certification: Daisuke Suzuki (dsuzuki@ess.sci.osaka-u.ac.jp)
Subjects: Infra-Red, Nova
We report the discovery and spectroscopic classification of a bright NIR transient during commissioning operations of the Galactic bulge survey carried out by the PRime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME). PRIME is a 1.8m telescope with 1.56 square degree FOV (0.5 arcsec/pixel) located in Sutherland, South Africa at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) (Kutyrev et al. 2023, Yama et al. 2023). PRIME24aadwvh was detected as a candidate transient generated in the real-time data reduction pipeline of PRIME at a H-band mag of 11.3 +/- 0.1 mag (all reported magnitudes are in the Vega system) on UT 2024-07-15 and at J2000 coordinates
RA 17:47:05.94
Dec -28:50:58.55
The source was not detected to a 10 sigma depth of 14.5 mag on UT 2024-07-07. There is no source at the position of the transient in archival VVV images. The transient is located only 0.3 degrees away from the Galactic center, with a corresponding integrated line of sight extinction of ~115 mags in V-band (Schalfly et al. 2011). Subsequent detections of the source indicate a fast fading light curve, decaying to H ~ 13.1 mag by 2024-08-01. On UT 2024-09-14, we obtained a NIR spectrum of the source with the FIRE spectrograph (Simcoe et al. 2013) on the Magellan Baade Telescope as part of a Target of Opportunity Program (PI: De). The spectrum shows a steep red continuum rising to K-band, with broad emission lines of Pa beta, the Brackett series and He I, with FWHM ~ 1200 km/s. We do not detect emission lines of C I or the CO band-head, overall confirming its classification as a heavily reddened He/N nova (Banerjee & Ashok 2013) at the Galactic center.
