GCN Circular 15966
Subject
GRB 140311A: Gemini-North redshift
Date
2014-03-12T16:33:51Z (10 years ago)
From
Ryan Chornock at Harvard <rchornock@cfa.harvard.edu>
R. Chornock (Harvard), D. B. Fox (Penn State), N. R. Tanvir (U. Leicester), and
E. Berger (Harvard) report:
We obtained 2x900s of spectroscopy of the optical afterglow (Xu et al., GCN
15947) of GRB 140311A (Racusin et al., GCN 15944) using GMOS on the 8-m Gemini-N
telescope beginning at 12:56 UT on March 12. We used the R831 grating to cover
the wavelength range of 6950-9075 Angs at a resolution of approximately 2.8
Angs. Our data exhibit a broad damped Lyman-alpha feature centered near 7250
Angs (redshift~4.95), in agreement with previous reports from Gemini-South
(Tanvir et al., GCN 15961) and NOT (D'Avanzo et al., GCN 15964). In addition,
we detect many metal lines, including C II, C II*, O I, O I*, Si II, Si II*, and
Si IV at a common redshift of 4.954, which we adopt as the redshift of the GRB.
We thank the Gemini staff, particularly Jesse Ball, for their excellent
assistance in obtaining these data.