GCN Circular 42519
Subject
GRB 251026B: SOAR Classification of GOTO25jgl/SN2025absf as a Type Ia supernova
Event
Date
2025-10-29T20:04:03Z (9 hours ago)
From
jcarney@unc.edu
Via
Web form
Jonathan Carney (UNC), Xander J. Hall (CMU), Igor Andreoni (UNC), Brendan O’Connor (CMU), Malte Busmann (LMU), Daniel Gruen (LMU), and Antonella Palmese (CMU) report:
We observed the source SN 2025absf reported by Belkin et al. (GCN 42470), a possible counterpart to short GRB 251026B (GCN 42455), with the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph (GHTS; Clemens 2004) on the Southern Astrophysical Telescope (SOAR). We used a grating of 400 lines/mm and a 1.0'' wide slit mask in the M1 spectroscopic setup (hereafter 400M1) with 2x2 binning using the GHTS Red Camera. The 400M1 spectra cover a wavelength range of 3800 -- 7040 Å. The spectra were reduced using Pypeit (Prochaska 2020), using arcs taken immediately after target observation and calibration images from the same night. Flux calibration was performed using observations of HR7596 taken on the same night as the observations with an identical 400M1 setup and 2x2 binning.
Using SNID (Blondin et al. 2011) and NGSF (AstroNote 2022-191), we find good template matches to a Ia-norm SN at z ~ 0.044. Thus, we classify SN 2025absf as a type Ia supernova. We therefore conclude that SN 2025absf is not the optical counterpart to GRB 251026B.
We thank the CTIO and NOIRLab staff for supporting these observations.