GCN Circular 9874
Subject
GRB 090902B: GROND NIR Afterglow Observations
Date
2009-09-03T09:14:50Z (15 years ago)
From
Thomas Kruehler at MPE/MPI <kruehler@mpe.mpg.de>
F. Olivares, P. Afonso, J. Greiner (all MPE Garching), S. McBreen (MPE +
UCD), T. Kruehler, A. Rau, A. Yoldas, G. Kanbach (all MPE), and S. Klose
(TLS Tautenburg) report on behalf of the GROND team:
The field of GRB 090902B, (Fermi GBM trigger 273582310/090902462, Bissaldi
et al., GCN #9866) which was detected by the LAT (de Palma et al., GCN
#9867), was observed simultaneously in g'r'i'z'JHK with GROND (Greiner et
al. 2008, PASP 120, 405) mounted at the 2.2 m ESO/MPI telescope at LaSilla
Observatory (Chile).
Observations started at 00:21 UT on September 3, 2009, 13.25 hours after
the GRB trigger. They were performed at a seeing of around 2", at an
average air mass larger than 2.0 and under variable sky conditions. We
detect a NIR source within the Swift/XRT error circle reported by Kennea et
al. (GCN #9868) and on the edge of the Swift/XRT enhanced position (Evans
et al. GCN #9871), at:
RA (J2000.0) = 17h 39m 45.41s
DEC (J2000.0) = +27d 19' 27.1"
with an uncertainty of 0.5" in each coordinate.
This position seems consistent with the object reported by Perley et al.
(GCN #9870) and is very likely the source reported by Swenson & Siegel (GCN
#9869).
The source is not in the field of view of the griz channels, so no
statement can be made about the optical bands.
The afterglow (Cucchiara et al. GCN #9873) has the following preliminary AB
magnitude and shows tentative evidence of fading within the observations.
midtime J_AB mag
-----------------------------------------------
01:09:31 UT 20.26 +/- 0.07
Calibrations was done against 2MASS catalog stars. No Galactic extinction
correction was applied.