GCN Circular 32044
Subject
GRB 220514A: MeerLICHT optical afterglow candidate
Date
2022-05-14T21:47:44Z (2 years ago)
From
Simon de Wet at UCT <dwtsim002@myuct.ac.za>
S. de Wet (UCT), P.M. Vreeswijk (Radboud) and D.B. Malesani (Radboud and
DAWN/NBI) report on behalf of the MeerLICHT consortium:
Following the detection of GRB 220514A by Fermi/GBM (Fermi GBM Team, GCN
32038) and INTEGRAL (Mereghetti et al., GCN 32041), the 0.6m wide-field
MeerLICHT telescope, located at Sutherland, South Africa obtained two 300 s
exposures of a field containing the INTEGRAL position in the q-band
beginning 6.75 hours after the GRB trigger. Based on an existing MeerLICHT
reference image of this field, we detect a new transient candidate within
the INTEGRAL error box with AB magnitude q = 19.89 +\- 0.13 at coordinates:
RA (J2000) = 09:50:39.73 (147.66556d)
Dec (J2000) = 13:09:22.61 (+13.15628d)
calibrated against Gaia DR2. This position is 33" from the centre of the
INTEGRAL error box, and no source is visible at the transient position in
Pan-STARRS images of the field. We suggest this may be the optical
afterglow to GRB 220514A. Further follow-up is encouraged.
MeerLICHT is built and run by a consortium consisting of Radboud
University, University of Cape Town, the South African Astronomical
Observatory, the University of Oxford, the University of Manchester and the
University of Amsterdam.