GCN 45168: IceCube-260712A: No candidates with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)

2026-07-15T15:08:15.643Z | rev 0 | event: IceCube-260712A
Cristobal Zilleruelo Cañas (DESY), Jannis Necker (Leiden University), Akshay Eranhalodi (DESY), Robert Stein (JSI), and Anna Franckowiak (Ruhr University Bochum) report,

On behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) collaborations:

As part of the ZTF neutrino follow up program (Stein et al. 2023), we observed the localization region of the neutrino event IceCube-260712A (Zilleruelo Cañas et. al, GCN 45141) with the Palomar 48-inch telescope, equipped with the 47 square degree ZTF camera (Bellm et al. 2019, Graham et al. 2019). Our observations were delated due to weather. We started observations in the g- and r-band beginning at 2026-07-14 04:58 UTC, approximately 41.9 hours after event time. We covered 97.5% (0.8 sq deg) of the reported localization region. This estimate accounts for chip gaps. Each exposure was 300s with a typical depth of 21.0 mag.

The images were processed in real-time through the ZTF reduction and image subtraction pipelines at IPAC to search for potential counterparts (Masci et al. 2019). AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019, Stein et al. 2021) was used to search the alerts database for candidates. We reject stellar sources (Tachibana and Miller 2018) and moving objects, and apply machine learning algorithms (Mahabal et al. 2019).

No candidate counterparts were detected. This is consistent with the findings of Garrappa et al. (GCN 45157).

ZTF and GROWTH are worldwide collaborations comprising Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; Cornell University, USA; Drexel University, USA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Institute of Science and Technology, Austria; National Central University, Taiwan; OKC, Sweden; DZA, Germany.

GROWTH acknowledges generous support of the NSF under PIRE Grant No 1545949.
Alert distribution service provided by DIRAC@UW (Patterson et al. 2019).
Alert database searches are done by AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019).
Alert filtering is performed with the nuztf (Stein et al. 2021, https://github.com/desy-multimessenger/nuztf ).