We report a radio detection of the optically bright tidal disruption event (TDE) AT2024rny/ZTF24aazlori with NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). AT2024rny was first discovered in the optical by ZTF on August 3, 2024 at 08:08:17 UTC (TNS Discovery Report No. 221163) and was classified as a TDE on September 3, 2024 at 13:00:23 UTC by the FLEET algorithm with an 84% probability of being a TDE (TNS Classification Report No. 17882; Gomez et al., 2023, ApJ, 949, 113).
We observed AT2024rny under the VLA program 24A-386 (P.I. Alexander) ~5 days after classification on September 7, 2024 at 05:02:22.5 UTC with the Ku-band receiver, which has an effective frequency of 15.1 GHz and frequency range of 12-18 GHz. We reduced the data using the NRAO CASA pipeline (version 6.5.4) and subsequently imaged it in CASA with standard procedures. We find a point source at (RA, Dec) = (22:57:28.79 +/- 0.02” +/- 0.04”, +39:25:44.39 +/- 0.02” +/- 0.04”) (statistical +/- systematic; systematic uncertainty is estimated as 10% of the synthesized beam width), consistent with the optical coordinates of AT2024rny. We measured a flux density of F = 49 +/- 5 +/- 1.5 microJy (statistical +/- systematic; systematic uncertainty estimated as 3% of the flux density). Previous VLA Sky Survey observations reveal a non-detection with a non-constraining upper limit of F < 400 microJy.
Further VLA observations at multiple frequencies are planned and monitoring observations by Swift in the X-ray and UV are ongoing. We encourage further multiwavelength followup.
We thank the VLA observing staff for their quick execution of this observation. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work made use of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources supported by the University of Arizona TRIF, UITS, and Research, Innovation, and Impact (RII) and maintained by the UArizona Research Technologies department.
Catalog | Name | Reported RA | Reported DEC | Reported Obj-Type | Reported Redshift | Host Name | Host Redshift | Remarks | TNS RA | TNS DEC | TNS Obj-Type | TNS Redshift |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
TNS | 2024rny | 22:57:28.808 | +39:25:44.37 | TDE | 0.1055 | PS1 155313443699515427 | 22:57:28.808 | +39:25:44.37 | TDE | 0.1055 |