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GCN Circular 21565

Subject
LIGO/Virgo G298048: Brightening of Possible Counterpart
Date
2017-08-18T15:58:41Z (7 years ago)
From
Iair Arcavi at LCOGT <iarcavi@lcogt.net>
I. Arcavi, D. A. Howell, C. McCully, G. Hosseinzadeh, S. Vasylyev (UCSB/Las
Cumbres Obs), M. Zalzman, D. Poznanski (TAU), L.P. Singer (NASA/GSFC), S.
Valenti (UC Davis), T. Piran (HUJI), D. Kasen, J. Barnes (UC Berkeley), W.
Fong (Northwestern) and D. Maoz (TAU) report the brightening of SSS17a /
DLT17ck, the possible optical counterpart reported by Coulter et al. (LVC
GCN 21529), Allam et al. (LVC GCN 21530), Yang et al. (LVC GCN 21531),
Melandri et al. (LVC GCN 21532) and others.

In the course of Las Cumbres Observatory LIGO followup we observed NGC 4993
from our 1-meter telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
in Chile at 2017-08-18 00:15 UT (Arcavi et al.; LCV GCN 21538) and at the
Siding Spring Observatory in Australia at 2017-08-18 09:10 UT. Both images
were taken in the broad w (=g+r+i) filter.

Preliminary aperture photometry, comparing to 7 nearby stars, indicates a
relative increase in brightness of the candidate by 0.11 magnitudes (with
an uncertainty of 0.03 magnitudes) in the ~9 hours between the first and
second epochs.

Further observations and analysis are ongoing.
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