Skip to main content
Testing. You are viewing the public testing version of GCN. For the production version, go to https://gcn.nasa.gov.
New! Circulars over Kafka, Heartbeat Topic, and Schema v4.1.0. See news and announcements

GCN Circular 16632

Subject
Trigger 607399: Swift detection of SGR1806-20
Date
2014-07-29T02:51:50Z (10 years ago)
From
David Palmer at LANL <palmer@lanl.gov>
M. G. Bernardini (INAF-OAB), P. D'Avanzo (INAF-OAB),
C. B. Markwardt (NASA/GSFC), D. M. Palmer (LANL) and
M. H. Siegel (PSU) report on behalf of the Swift Team:

At 02:41:23 UT, the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) triggered and
located a burst from the Soft Gamma Repeater SGR 1806-20 (trigger=607399).  
Swift slewed immediately to the burst location. 
The BAT on-board calculated location is 
RA, Dec 272.172, -20.437 which is 
   RA(J2000) = 18h 08m 41s
   Dec(J2000) = -20d 26' 13"
with an uncertainty of 3 arcmin (radius, 90% containment, including 
systematic uncertainty), which is 1.8 arcminutes from the location 
of the SGR.  The BAT light curve showed a single-peaked
structure with a duration of about 0.25 sec.  The peak count rate
was ~15000 counts/sec (15-350 keV), at ~0 sec after the trigger. 

The XRT began observing the field at 02:42:52.6 UT, 88.9 seconds after
the BAT trigger. No source was detected in 303 s of promptly downlinked
data. We are waiting for the full dataset to detect and localise the
XRT counterpart. 

UVOT took a finding chart exposure of 150 seconds with the White filter
starting 93 seconds after the BAT trigger. No credible afterglow candidate has
been found in the initial data products. The 2.7'x2.7' sub-image covers 25% of
the BAT error circle. The typical 3-sigma upper limit has been about 19.6 mag. 
The 8'x8' region for the list of sources generated on-board covers 100% of the
BAT error circle. The list of sources is typically complete to about 18 mag. No
correction has been made for the large, but uncertain extinction expected.
Looking for U.S. government information and services? Visit USA.gov