We report the discovery of a bright candidate supernova found in regular survey operations of Palomar Gattini-IR (De et al. 2020; Moore and Kasliwal 2019). Palomar Gattini-IR is a wide-field NIR transient survey scanning the entire Northern sky to a median depth of 15.7 AB mag every two nights.
The bright near-infrared transient PGIR20eid / AT2020qmp was first detected on UT 2020-07-30 at a magnitude J = 14.74 +/- 0.02 AB mag. The transient was not detected on UT 2020-07-25 to a depth of 15.1 AB mag. The transient is coincident with a spiral arm of the nearby galaxy UGC07125, reported at a median distance of 12 Mpc in NED. At an assumed distance of 12 Mpc, the absolute magnitude of the transient is -15.7 mag in J band, suggesting a young supernova when combined with the recent non-detection.
We encourage rapid spectroscopic and multi-color photometric follow-up of the source.
