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GCN Circular 31313

Subject
GRB 211226A: Swift/BAT-GUANO detection outside the coded FOV
Date
2021-12-27T14:18:01Z (2 years ago)
From
Aaron Tohuvavohu at U Toronto <aaron.tohu@gmail.com>
Aaron Tohuvavohu (U Toronto), James DeLaunay (UAlabama), Gayathri
Raman (PSU), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), report:

Swift/BAT did not localize GRB 211226A (T0: 2021-12-26T05:25:41 UTC,
INTEGRAL/SPI-ACS trig #9576, AGILE GCN 31309).

The INTEGRAL notice, distributed in near real-time, triggered the
Swift Mission Operations Center operated Gamma-ray Urgent Archiver for
Novel Opportunities (GUANO; Tohuvavohu et al. 2020, ApJ, 900, 1).

Upon trigger by this notice, GUANO sent a command to the Swift Burst
Alert Telescope (BAT) to save 90 seconds of BAT event-mode data from
[-45,+45] seconds around the time of the burst. All the requested
event mode data was delivered to the ground.

The BAT likelihood search, NITRATES (DeLaunay + Tohuvavohu,
arXiv:2111.01769), detects the burst with a sqrt(TS) of 86.7 in a
8.192 s analysis time bin.
The duration of the burst in BAT is ~12 seconds.

NITRATES results strongly indicate a burst coming from outside the
coded FOV, with DeltaLLHOut of -256.

See Section 9.1 and Figure 20 in the NITRATES paper for brief
descriptions and interpretation of sqrt(TS), DeltaLLHPeak, and
DeltaLLHOut.

GUANO is a fully autonomous, extremely low latency, spacecraft
commanding pipeline designed for targeted recovery of BAT event mode
data around the times of compelling astrophysical events to enable
more sensitive GRB searches.

A live reporting of Swift/BAT event data recovered by GUANO can be
found at: https://www.swift.psu.edu/guano/
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