GCN Circular 17655
Subject
GRB 150323C: possible host galaxy detection
Date
2015-03-29T20:03:27Z (9 years ago)
From
Daniele Malesani at Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Inst <malesani@dark-cosmology.dk>
Daniele Malesani (DARK/NBI), Dong Xu (DARK/NBI), Pall Jakobsson (Univ.
Iceland) and Jussi Harmanen (NOT and Univ. Turku) report on behalf of
a larger collaboration:
We observed the field of GRB 150323C (Amaral-Rogers et al., GCN 17621;
Stanbro, GCN 17627) using the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) located in
La Palma. The mean time of the observation was March 28.21 UT, that is
4.49 days after the GRB. A 20 min exposure was collected using the SDSS
r filter.
Close to the position of the optical afterglow (Xu et al., GCN 17625;
Watson et al., GCN 17632), we detect an object with r = 23.6 +- 0.2 AB
(calibrated against nearby SDSS stars). This source is also marginally
detected in the archival SDSS images with a comparable (though
uncertain) brightness, and therefore an underlying galaxy must be
contributing a significant fraction of the light.
We note a small, but significant offset between the afterglow and the
galaxy positions. By registering astrometrically the afterglow image by
Xu et al. (GCN 17625) with the new NOT data, we find an offset of
approximately 0.65". Such an offset is not unprecedented, so that the
SDSS/NOT object is still a viable host galaxy candidate for GRB 150323C.
[GCN OPS NOTE(30mar15): Per author's request, JH's affiliation was changed.]