AstroNote 2020-151

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF; Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) Infant Supernova Science Program (Gal-Yam 2019) reports the early discovery of AT 2020rcq (ZTF20abqvsik), following the methodology outlined by Gal-Yam et al. (2011).

The object was first detected on ZTF r-band images obtained on August 9, 2020 at 04:01 UT, about 2 days after the last non-detection, and was picked up by several Marshal filters (including the Infant SNe filter, the filter for Rapidly Evolving Transients, the Census of the Local Universe and the Fast Transient filter). The object was saved by a duty astronomer and spectroscopic follow-up observations were triggered.

After its first detection on August 9, the r-band flux of the transient rose by 3.3 magnitudes over 2 days suggesting that this potential SN exploded shortly before the first detection.

Assuming the redshift of the apparent host (UGC 06930, z=0.00259 from NED), the object was discovered with an absolute magnitude of Mr=-15 on August 11. Due to the limited visibility, rapid spectroscopic follow-up is highly encouraged.

We will continue to distribute alerts on such early SN detections via AstroNotes.

ZTF is a project led by PI S. R. Kulkarni at Caltech, and includes IPAC; WIS, Israel; OKC, Sweden; JSI/UMd, USA; UW,USA; DESY, Germany; NRC, Taiwan; UW Milwaukee, USA and LANL USA. ZTF acknowledges the generous support of the NSF under AST MSIP Grant No 1440341. Alert distribution service provided by DIRAC@UW. Alert filtering is being undertaken by the GROWTH marshal system (Kasliwal et al. 2019), supported by NSF PIRE grant 1545949.