The optical afterglow and host galaxy of GRB000926
Abstract
We present the discovery of the Optical Transient (OT) of the long-duration gamma-ray burst GRB000926. The optical transient was detected independently with the Nordic Optical Telescope and at Calar Alto 22.2 hours after the burst. At this time the magnitude of the transient was R = 19.36. The transient faded with a decay slope of about 1.7 during the first two days after which the slope increased abruptly (within a few hours) to about 2.4. The light-curve started to flatten off after about a week indicating the presence of an underlying extended object. This object was detected in a deep image obtained one month after the GRB at R=23.87+-0.15 and consists of several compact knots within about 5 arcsec. One of the knots is spatially coincident with the position of the OT and hence most likely belongs to the host galaxy. Higher resolution imaging is needed to resolve whether all the compact knots belong to the host galaxy or to several independent objects. In a separate paper we present a discussion of the optical spectrum of the OT, and its inferred redshift (Moller et al. in prep.).
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0102158,
title = {The optical afterglow and host galaxy of GRB000926},
author = {J. U. Fynbo and J. Gorosabel and T. H. Dall and J. Hjorth and H. Pedersen and M. I. Andersen and P. Moller and I. Smail and N. Kobayashi and P. Vreeswijk and I. Burud and S. Holland and B. L. Jensen and B. Thomsen and A. Henden and F. Vrba and B. Canzian and J. M. Castro Cerón and A. J. Castro-Tirado and T. Cline and M. Goto and J. Greiner and M. T. Hanski and K. Hurley and N. Lund and T. Pursimo and R. Oestensen and J. Solheim and N. Tanvir and H. Terada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0102158},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in the A&A main journal