GCN Circular 15624
Subject
GRB 131227A: Gemini-North Redshift
Date
2013-12-27T18:44:22Z (10 years ago)
From
Antonino Cucchiara at NASA/GSFC <antonino.cucchiara@nasa.gov>
A. Cucchiara (ORAU/NASA-GSFC) and S.B. Cenko (NASA-GSFC)
report on behalf of a larger collaboration:
"On December 27.42 UT (~ 5.1 hr after the Swift trigger) we
began observing the afterglow of GRB 131227A (Oates et al.
GCN 15616, Zheng et al. GCN 15617) with the GMOS spectrograph
mounted on the Gemini-North telescope.
Under poor seeing conditions the afterglow was marginally
detected in our i�-band acquisition image.
Nevertheless, we performed a spectroscopic sequence of 2x900s
spectra with GMOS and the R400 grating, covering the 4400-8600A
wavelength range.
Clear evidence of continuum flux is detected beyond 7600A, while
no flux is present in either spectra nor in a coadded spectrum
blueward of this wavelength.
No other obvious emission or absorption features are present in
the spectrum, though the signal-to-noise ratio is not extremely
high.
If this break is due to Lyman-alpha, the implied GRB redshift
would be z~5.3.
We caution, however, that this line of sight is subject to high
galactic extinction (A_V= 2.8).
We thank the Gemini staff for performing these observations under
challenging conditions, in particular Marie Lemoine-Busserolle."