Skip to main content
Announcing GCN Classic Migration Survey, End of Legacy Circulars Email. See news and announcements

GCN Circular 33859

Subject
GRB 230523A: Swift/BAT-GUANO detection of a short hard burst
Date
2023-05-23T22:58:55Z (2 years ago)
From
Aaron Tohuvavohu at University of Toronto <aaron.tohu@gmail.com>
Gayathri Raman (PSU), Samuele Ronchini (PSU), James DeLaunay (UAlabama), Aaron Tohuvavohu (U Toronto), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC) report:

Swift/BAT did not localize GRB 230523A onboard (T0: 2023-05-23T15:23:52.68 UTC, INTEGRAL/SPI-ACS #10268). 

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 2022, ApJ, 941, 169), detects the burst with a sqrt(TS) of 12.4 in a 1.024 s analysis time bin.
The burst duration is ~2 seconds.

NITRATES results, independently, are ambiguous with respect to whether this burst originates from in or outside the BAT coded FOV, with a borderline DeltaLLHOut of 8.33.

See Section 9.1 and Figures 10 and 17 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/
Looking for U.S. government information and services? Visit USA.gov