GCN Circular 45310
Subject
IceCube-260805A: One candidate from the Zwicky Transient Facility
Event
Date
2026-08-07T16:29:17Z (3 days ago)
From
akshay.eranhalodi@desy.de
Via
Web form
Akshay Eranhalodi (DESY), Robert Stein (JSI), Cristobal Zilleruelo Cañas (DESY), Jannis Necker (Leiden University), and Anna Franckowiak (Ruhr University Bochum) report,
On behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) collaborations:
As part of the ZTF neutrino follow up program (Stein et al. 2023), we observed the localization region of the neutrino event IceCube-260805A (IceCube Collaboration, GCN 45294) 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 2026-08-06 10:23 UTC, approximately 20.4 hours after event time. We covered 65.4% (1.0 sq deg) of the reported localization region. This estimate accounts for chip gaps. Each exposure was 300s with a typical depth of 21.0 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). We are left with one transient candidate by our pipeline, lying within the 90.0% localization of the skymap.
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| ZTF Name | IAU Name | RA (deg) | DEC (deg) | Filter | Mag | MagErr |
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| ZTF26aaskzvj | AT 2026jrc | +60.57411872 | +25.81342036 | g | 20.937 | 0.182 |
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ZTF26aaskzvj/AT 2026jrc was first detected on 2026-04-15, and is a SN-like transient associated with a nearby galaxy in NED at z=0.0192 (~85 Mpc). The transient is only marginally detected with forced photometry at the neutrino arrival time. The source appears to have peaked 100 days ago at M<-18 in r-band, and is now much fainter at M=-15.4 as of last week.
We encourage spectroscopic follow-up to determine its nature and asses potential high-energy neutrino emission scenarios.
ZTF and GROWTH are worldwide collaborations comprising Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, 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; OKC, Sweden; DZA, Germany.
GROWTH acknowledges generous support of the NSF under PIRE Grant No 1545949.
Alert distribution service provided by DIRAC@UW (Patterson et al. 2019).
Alert database searches are done by AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019).
Alert filtering is performed with the nuztf (Stein et al. 2021, https://github.com/desy-multimessenger/nuztf ).