GCN Circular 7832
Subject
GRB 080605: VLT redshift
Date
2008-06-06T03:56:15Z (16 years ago)
From
Pall Jakobsson at U Hertfordshire <P.Jakobsson@herts.ac.uk>
Pall Jakobsson (U. Hertfordshire), Paul M. Vreeswijk,
Dong Xu and Christina C. Thoene (DARK, NBI) report on behalf
of a larger collaboration:
Using FORS2 on the Very Large Telescope, we have obtained
a 10 min spectrum (grism 300V) of the optical afterglow of
GRB 080605 (Sbarufatti et al., GCN 7828). The acquisition
image shows it to have R = 20.4 on June 6.063 (1.7 hours
post burst).
A firm upper limit of z < 2.1 can be placed on the redshift
of GRB 080605 from the lack of Ly-alpha forest lines in the
spectrum of the afterglow.
The spectrum is rich in absorption features, including Si II,
C IV, Al II, Al III, Zn II, Fe II, Mg II and Mg I, corresponding
to a redshift of z = 1.6398 +/- 0.0006.
We thank the Paranal staff for excellent support, especially
Linda Schmidtobreick.