TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  21851
SUBJECT: LIGO/Virgo G298048: VLA radio non-detection
DATE:    17/09/08 13:23:16 GMT
FROM:    Kate Alexander at Harvard U  <kalexander@cfa.harvard.edu>

K. D. Alexander, E. Berger, T. Eftekhari, W. Fong, and R. Margutti report
on behalf of a larger collaboration:

We observed the location of the optical counterpart of LIGO/Virgo
G298048 (Coulter
et al. LVC GCN 21529; Allam et al. LVC GCN 21530) with the Very Large Array
at a frequency of 6 GHz (C-band) on September 5.925 UT.  We do not detect
any significant radio emission (S/N>3) and therefore cannot confirm the
radio detection reported two days earlier by Corsi et al. (LVC GCN
21815) for a comparable integration time on source and at the same
frequency.  This indicates either rapid fading (not expected for off-axis
jet emission), significant variability (not expected from scintillation
given the small source distance and hence large angular size), or a
spurious detection in the previously reported observations.   Further
observations are underway.