GCN Circular 5261
Subject
GRB 060614: optical observations
Date
2006-06-15T16:22:59Z (18 years ago)
From
Daniele Malesani at SISSA-ISAS,Trieste,Italy <malesani@sissa.it>
D. Malesani (SISSA), S. Covino, S. Campana, D. Fugazza, G. Tagliaferri
(INAF/OABr), G. Chincarini (Univ. Milano-Bicocca), and L. Stella
(INAF/OAR), report on behalf of the MISTICI collaboration:
We have observed the afterglow of GRB 060614 (Parsons et al., GCN 5252)
with the ESO VLT-UT1 equipped with the FORS2 instrument.
The optical afterglow is well detected in the R filter, and shows a
dimming by 0.45+-0.03 mag between 14.4 and 21.6 hr after the GRB.
Assuming a power-law decay, this corresponds to a decay slope alpha ~ 1,
consistent with what found by French et al. (GCN 5257). Compared with
several nearby USNO-B1 stars (R1 magnitudes), the afterglow has R~19.3
on Jun 14.12892, with a calibration uncertainty of ~0.2 mag.
We note an overall similarity between the early optical light curves of
GRB 060614 and GRB 060218 (Campana et al., astro-ph/0603279), both
presenting a maximum ~0.5 d after the burst. GRB 060614 is however
peaking earlier. We encourage further follow-up of this interesting event.
We acknowledge excellent support from the ESO staff at Paranal, in
particular Rachel Gilmour and Leonardo Vanzi.