GRB 260114A

General information

GRB 260114A is a short-duration gamma-ray burst detected by Swift/BAT and multiple high-energy instruments, with an X-ray afterglow localized by Swift/XRT. Extensive follow-up was reported across bands, including a likely host-galaxy redshift around z≈0.524.

Wavelength coverage

• Gamma-ray: Detected by Swift/BAT, Fermi/GBM, Konus-Wind, GECAM-B, SVOM/GRM, and Insight-HXMT/HE; sub-second prompt emission with hard cutoff spectra reported.
• X-ray: Swift/XRT detected and refined the afterglow position; light-curve decay and an absorbed power-law spectrum were reported.
• UV/optical: Swift/UVOT reports non-detections with upper limits; multiple ground-based facilities report limits, while early reports claim a faint optical source consistent with the XRT region.
• Near-IR: VLT/HAWK-I and TNG/NICS report deep upper limits (e.g., H/Ks-band non-detections).
• Radio: VLA 6 GHz observations yield a non-detection with a ∼30 μJy (3σ) upper limit. No observations were mentioned for millimeter/sub-millimeter, very-high-energy (TeV), or GeV-LAT follow-up.

Lightcurve and spectrum

• Duration: T90 reported as ∼0.28 s (Insight-HXMT/HE) and ∼0.38 s (SVOM/GRM; GECAM-B); Swift/BAT reports ∼0.5 s structure.
• Prompt spectrum/energetics: Fermi/GBM and Konus-Wind report cutoff/Band-like spectra with Epeak of order ∼575–954 keV and fluence of order ∼(4.9–6.7)×10^-6 erg/cm^2 (band/instrument dependent). Konus-Wind reports fluence 5.12×10^-6 erg/cm^2 (20 keV–10 MeV) and 16-ms peak flux 2.76×10^-5 erg/cm^2/s.
• X-ray afterglow: Swift/XRT reports a power-law decay with index α≈2.9 and an absorbed power-law spectrum with photon index ≈1.7 (large uncertainties).

Redshift

z≈0.524 was reported for a putative host galaxy from VLT/X-shooter spectroscopy based on multiple emission lines, and VLT/MUSE spectroscopy finds several nearby objects at z≈0.52 supporting this as the likely GRB redshift.

What’s special vs typical

A relatively well-constrained likely redshift (z≈0.524) is reported for this short GRB, and an early faint optical candidate was claimed but later deep optical/NIR imaging largely yields non-detections, suggesting a rapidly fading or very faint counterpart.