GCN Circular 35969
Subject
GRB 240318A: Swift/BAT-GUANO detection of a burst outside the coded FOV
Date
2024-03-21T14:50:33Z (8 months ago)
From
Jimmy DeLaunay at Penn State <delauj2@gmail.com>
Via
Web form
James DeLaunay (PSU), Samuele Ronchini (PSU), Gayathri Raman (PSU), Aaron Tohuvavohu (U Toronto), Jamie A. Kennea (PSU), Tyler Parsotan (NASA GSFC) report:
Swift/BAT did not localize GRB 240318A onboard (T0: 2024-03-18T02:51:01.82 UTC, Fermi trig 732423066)
The Fermi 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 200 seconds of BAT event-mode data from [-50,+150] 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), performed on the temporal window [T0-20 s, T0+20 s], detects the burst with a sqrt(TS) of 69.4 in a 4.096 s analysis time bin, starting at T0.
NITRATES results are consistent with a burst coming from outside the FOV, with DeltaLLHOut of -292.
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/