GCN Circular 4532
Subject
GRB 060116: VLT optical observations
Date
2006-01-17T05:59:55Z (19 years ago)
From
Daniele Malesani at SISSA-ISAS,Trieste,Italy <malesani@sissa.it>
P. D'Avanzo (INAF/OABr), D. Malesani (SISSA/ISAS), L.A. Antonelli (INAF/OABr), report
on behalf of the MISTICI collaboration:
We observed the field of GRB 060116 (Campana et al., GCN 4519; Barthelmy
et al., GCN 4531) with the ESO-VLT UT2 equipped with FORS 1. Observations
were carried out in the R and I filters, starting on Jan 17.069 UT (17 h
after the burst).
The object reported by Kocevski, Bloom & McGrath (GCN 4528) is not
detected in our images down to a limiting magnitude I > 24.5 and R > 24.9
(3 sigma, calibrated against the USNO-B1 catalog).
Our non detection indicates that the candidate object by Kocevski et al.
(GCN 4528) is very likely the J-band afterglow of GRB 060116, which faded
significantly between the two observations.
We further note a faint, red object inside the XRT error box (Campana et
al., GCN 4522, 4529), at the coordinates (0.3" arcsec error):
alpha(J2000) = 05:38:46.170;
delta(J2000) = -05:26:15.08.
This is 2.5" away of the afterglow position (Kocevski et al., GCN 4528).
A finding chart in the I filter is posted at the following URL:
http://www.merate.mi.astro.it/~davanzo/GRB/grb060116_find_I.jpeg
This message can be cited.
[GCN OPS NOTE(18jan06): Per author's request, the affiliation was added to
the Malesani author.]