A Tale of Two Transients: GW 170104 and GRB 170105A

August 2017 • 2017ApJ...845..152B

Authors • Bhalerao, V. • Kasliwal, M. M. • Bhattacharya, D. • Corsi, A. • Aarthy, E. • Adams, S. M. • Blagorodnova, N. • Cantwell, T. • Cenko, S. B. • Fender, R. • Frail, D. • Itoh, R. • Jencson, J. • Kawai, N. • Kong, A. K. H. • Kupfer, T. • Kutyrev, A. • Mao, J. • Mate, S. • Mithun, N. P. S. • Mooley, K. • Perley, D. A. • Perrott, Y. C. • Quimby, R. M. • Rao, A. R. • Singer, L. P. • Sharma, V. • Titterington, D. J. • Troja, E. • Vadawale, S. V. • Vibhute, A. • Vedantham, H. • Veilleux, S.

Abstract • We present multi-wavelength follow-up campaigns by the AstroSat CZTI and GROWTH collaborations in search of an electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave event GW 170104. At the time of the GW 170104 trigger, the AstroSat CZTI field of view covered 50.3% of the sky localization. We do not detect any hard X-ray (>100 keV) signal at this time, and place an upper limit of ≈ 4.5× {10}^-7 {erg} {cm}}^-2 {{{s}}}^-1, for a 1 s timescale. Separately, the ATLAS survey reported a rapidly fading optical source dubbed ATLAS17aeu in the error circle of GW 170104. Our panchromatic investigation of ATLAS17aeu shows that it is the afterglow of an unrelated long, soft GRB 170105A, with only a fortuitous spatial coincidence with GW 170104. We then discuss the properties of this transient in the context of standard long GRB afterglow models.

Links

• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2017ApJ...845..152B
• PDF https://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/845/152/pdf
• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00024
• DATA https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/bibdata/2017/B/2017ApJ...845..152B.html
• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.3847%2F1538-4357%2Faa81d2