GCN Circular 43606
Subject
GRB 260131A/AT2026bwg: Observations by the Zwicky Transient Facility
Event
Date
2026-02-02T19:28:33Z (8 months ago)
From
rj438@cornell.edu
Via
Web form
R. Jayaraman (Cornell), X. J. Hall (CMU), A. Y. Q. Ho (Cornell), I. Andreoni (UNC), M. Coughlin (UMN), A. Jacquesson (IJCLab), G. Schroeder (Cornell) report:
We report a serendipitous detection of the optical afterglow to GRB 260131A (Fermi/GBM Team, GCN 43579; Frederiks et al., GCN 43590; Luo et al., GCN 43591; Li et al., GCN 43605), which has been given the designation AT2026bwg (Gompertz et al., GCN 43586; Lee et al., GCN 43587; Malesani et al;, GCN 43595, García et al., GCN 43599; Shi et al., GCN 43601), as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility’s public survey.
The transient ZTF26aaemwcb was first detected on MJD 61072.16995 (21.4h after the GRB trigger) with a magnitude of r = 18.08 ± 0.05 in ZTF alert photometry. Roughly a day later (MJD 61073.15126), the transient had faded to r = 19.13 ± 0.10. The last upper limit was approximately 2.5h before the initial trigger, with a limiting magnitude of r > 19.411.
Separately, the transient was also observed at MJD 61072.13239 (20.5h after the GRB trigger) using multi-band imaging with the SED Machine on the Palomar P60 telescope. The table of photometry follows:
Time (MJD) | Magnitude
61072.13239 | 18.21 ± 0.14 (sdss-g)
61072.13405 | 18.03 ± 0.20 (sdss-r)
61072.13571 | 17.80 ± 0.48 (sdss-i)
These measurements from both ZTF and SEDM are consistent with a decaying afterglow, when compared to those from Gompertz et al., Lee et al., Malesani et al., and García et al. The fast rise and decay was initially flagged by a pipeline for discovering afterglows in the ZTF data (e.g., Ho et al. 2020, ApJ, 905, 98), as well as the ZTFrest filter (Andreoni et al. 2021, ApJ, 918, 63). Upon a retrospective search, we identified ZTF26aaemwcb as the afterglow to GRB 260131A.
This Circular is 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; and OKC, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Operations are conducted by Caltech's Optical Observatory (COO), Caltech/IPAC, and the University of Washington at Seattle, USA.