GCN Circular 41414

Robert Stein (JSI/UMD), Tomás Ahumada (Caltech) Mansi Kasliwal (Caltech), Theophile du Laz (Caltech), Utkarsh Pathak (IITB), Vishwajeet Swain (IITB), Anirudh Salgundi (UNC), Varun Bhalerao (IITB), Xander J. Hall (CMU) report,

On behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) collaborations: 

We observed the localization region of the LVK trigger S250818k with the Palomar 48-inch telescope, equipped with the 47 square degree ZTF camera (Bellm et al. 2019, Graham et al. 2019). We started observations in the g- and r-band beginning at 2025-08-18 04:02 UTC, approximately 2.7 hours after merger. We covered 25.2% (168.3 sq deg) of the reported localization region. This estimate accounts for chip gaps. Each exposure was 300s with a typical depth of 22 mag. 
 
The images were processed in real-time through the ZTF reduction and image subtraction pipelines at IPAC to search for potential counterparts (Masci et al. 2019). AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019, Stein et al. 2021) was used to search the alerts database for candidates. We reject stellar sources (Tachibana and Miller 2018) and moving objects, and apply machine learning algorithms (Mahabal et al. 2019) , and removing candidates with history of variability prior to the merger time. 

We are left with 58 transient candidates, all lying within the 95.0% localization of the skymap. We perform additional vetting of these candidates, and identify those which appear to be hosted in galaxies at plausible redshifts for S250818k.

We highlight one of these candidates, ZTF25abjmnps/AT2025ulz
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| ZTF Name     | IAU Name  | RA (deg)    | DEC (deg)   | Filter | Mag   | MagErr |
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| ZTF25abjmnps | AT2025ulz
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  | 237.9757129 | +30.9023146 | r      | 21.29 | 0.13   |
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ZTF25abjmnps is in an elliptical galaxy with a Legacy Survey photometric redshift of z = 0.091 +/- 0.016, is therefore consistent with the estimated distance of S250818k. The lower 95th percentile limit of the photoz is 0.057, and at this distance S250818k would have an absolute g-band peak magnitude of M=-16.1. However, the higher redshifts would be more consistent with a supernova luminosity of M=-17. 

Forced photometry of this source reveals several detections in our data. The source appears to possibly be fading in g-band, but given the low SNR and short baseline it is difficult to constrain this.

There are also several recent non-detections, but all upper limits are shallower than the magnitude of the transient in our images. We therefore cannot confirm whether the source is young, or if it predates the merger.

We encourage observations of ZTF25abjmnps, to determine the nature of this source. 

Analysis of the remaining ZTF candidates is ongoing.

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award #2407588 and a partnership including Caltech, USA; Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, USA; Cornell University, USA; Drexel University, USA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Institute of Science and Technology, Austria; National Central University, Taiwan; Operations are conducted by Caltech's Optical Observatory (COO) and Caltech/IPAC. GROWTH acknowledges the generous support of the NSF under PIRE Grant No 1545949. Alert database searches are done by AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019) and Kowalski (Duev et al. 2019). The GROWTH India Telescope (GIT, Kumar et al., 2022) is set up by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) with funding from DST-SERB and IUSSTF. Its operations are partially supported by funding from the IIT Bombay alumni batch of 1994. The Fritz and SkyPortal projects acknowledge the generous support of The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.