GCN Circular 21781
Subject
LIGO/Virgo G298048: Hubble Space Telescope observations
Date
2017-08-31T20:33:24Z (7 years ago)
From
Nial Tanvir at U of Leicester <nrt3@le.ac.uk>
A.J. Levan (Warwick), E. Troja (UMD/GSFC), N.R. Tanvir (Leicester),
O. Fox (STScI), J. Hjorth (DARK, Copenhagen), S. B. Cenko (GSFC),
A. S. Fruchter (STScI), R. Ryan (STScI), Z. Cano (Granada), A. de
Ugarte Postigo (Granada), P. Evans (Leicester), J. Greiner (MPE
Garching), N. Kawai (Tokyo Tech), H. Khandrika (STScI), A. Lien
(UMBC/GSFC), J. Lyman (Warwick), I. Mandel (Birmingham), P. O'Brien
(Leicester), J. Osborne (Leicester), E. Palazzi (INAF-IASF Bologna),
D. Perley (LJMU), E. Pian (INAF-IASF Bologna), L. Piro (INAF/IAPS),
T. Sakamoto (AGU), S. Schulze (Weizmann Institute of Science),
S. Rosswog (Stockholm), D. Steeghs (Warwick), P. Sutton (Cardiff),
D. Watson (DARK, Copenhagen) report:
We obtained both multi-wavelength imaging and spectroscopy of
the proposed counterpart (LVC GCN 21529) of LIGO/Virgo G298048
(LVC GCN 21509) with the Hubble Space Telescope at several epochs
between 22 and 28 August (under programmes GO 14804 (Levan),
GO 14850 (Troja) and GO 14771 (Tanvir)). The transient is well
detected in both the nIR and optical imaging, but is fading rapidly at the
end of the observations, with a factor two fading between Aug 26
and Aug 28 in the F160W filter.
Spectroscopy at the first epoch covers the range 0.9-1.6 microns,
and the counterpart is well detected across this spectral range.
The spectrum is dominated by a range of broad features, most notably
a peak at ~1.1 microns, but additional features are observed between
1.2 and 1.6 microns.
An image of the field, as observed by HST is shown at
http://www.astro.warwick.ac.uk/people/levan/gw_hst001
NOTE: The page is password protected with password HsT_G298048, and
the image should not be shared.
We thank the staff of STScI, in particular Patrica Royle, Alison
Vick, Neill Reid and Lou Strolger for their rapid work in scheduling
these ToO observations.