TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  41516
SUBJECT: GRB 250818B: MeerKAT Detection
DATE:    25/08/24 01:11:07 GMT
FROM:    Genevieve Schroeder at Cornell University <genevieveschroeder@u.northwestern.edu>

G. Schroeder (Cornell), W. Fong (Northwestern), T. Laskar (Utah), L. Rhodes (TSI/McGill) report:

We observed the location of the SVOM short-duration GRB 250818B (Wang et al., GCN 41405) with a Swift/XRT counterpart (Ferro et al., GCN 41407) with the MeerKAT radio telescope under Director’s Discretionary program DDT-20250822-GS-01 (PI Schroeder) at 1.3 GHz and 3.1 GHz on 2025 August 23 (~5 days post burst). 

In preliminary analysis, we detect the radio afterglow (Ricci et al., GCN 41455) in the 3.1 GHz image, but not in 1.3 GHz (rms of 7 microJy/beam).  We measure a flux density of ~30 microJy at 3.1 GHz. Further observations are planned.

We thank Fernando Camilo for the rapid approval of the DDT proposal, and the staff at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory for scheduling these observations.