GCN Circular 41640
Isaac McMahon, Sean MacBride, Marcelle Soares-Santos (UZH), Lillian Joseph (Benedictine U.), reporting on behalf of the Dark Energy Survey Gravitational Wave (DESGW) Team:
At 2025-09-01 03:39:18 UTC, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) began the first epoch of observations in response to the LVK alert issued for the candidate gravitational-wave event S250830bp (GCN 41606). We observed four fields centered on the following ICRS coordinates:
| RA | DEC |
|---|---|
| 324.165777 | -77.51123 |
| 327.955221 | -77.54517 |
| 323.965777 | -77.61123 |
| 327.755221 | -77.64517 |
These pointings cover the 90% localization region of candidate gravitational-wave event S250830bp.
All fields were observed in DECam g, r, i, z filters with 90-second exposures. The limiting magnitudes achieved for epoch 1 were 21.8 in g, 21.8 in r, and 21.5 in i, and 20.7 in z.
We process the images with our difference imaging pipeline (Herner et al. 2020) using DES and public DECam images as templates. We employ the autoscan machine learning code (Goldstein et al 2015) to reject subtraction artifacts. Candidates were initially selected by requiring at least two high signal to noise detections, which were separated in time in order to reject moving objects. We also require an autoscan score of at least 0.7 on at least one of those detections. We also match our candidates against the ALLWISE, Milliquas, and Quaia AGN catalogs (Secrest et al 2015, Flesch 2023, Storey-Fisher et al 2024) within the LVK localization volume to determine if any correspond to known active galactic nuclei.
Poor observing conditions during observing complicated positive identification of transient candidates. However, we report one candidate below with good detections in multiple bands. The candidate is separated by 5.58 arcseconds from the center of the apparent host galaxy LEDA 236249, which does not have a reported redshift.
| ID | ATNAME | RA | DEC | MAG_G | MAG_G_ERR | MAG_R | MAG_R_ERR | MAG_I | MAG_I_ERR | MAG_Z | MAG_Z_ERR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DESGW_3336579 | AT2025wpk | 329.476163 | -77.41256 | 22.41 | 0.24 | 21.39 | 0.09 | 21.1 | 0.06 | 20.93 | 0.14 |
Further observations are ongoing and we encourage followup of the event region and the above candidate.
The DECam Search & Discovery Program for Optical Signatures of Gravitational Wave Events (DESGW) is carried out by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration in partnership with wide-ranging groups in the community. DESGW uses data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the DES collaboration with support from the Department of Energy and member institutions, and utilizes data as distributed by the Science Data Archive at NOIRLAB. NOIRLAB is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. We thank the Cerro Tololo observatory staff for their support in acquiring these observations.