A tale of two transients: GW170104 and GRB170105A


Abstract in English

We present multi-wavelength follow-up campaigns by the AstroSat-CZTI and GROWTH collaborations to search for an electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave event GW170104. At the time of the GW170104 trigger, the AstroSat CZTI field-of-view covered 50.3% of the sky localization. We do not detect any hard X-ray (>100 keV) signal at this time, and place an upper limit of $approx 4.5 times 10^{-7}~{rm erg~cm}^{-2}{rm~s}^{-1}$ for a 1,s timescale. Separately, the ATLAS survey reported a rapidly fading optical source dubbed ATLAS17aeu in the error circle of GW170104. Our panchromatic investigation of ATLAS17aeu shows that it is the afterglow of an unrelated long, soft GRB~170105A, with only a fortuitous spatial coincidence with GW170104. We then discuss the properties of this transient in the context of standard long GRB afterglow models.

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