CHARACTERIZING THE V-BAND LIGHT-CURVES OF HYDROGEN-RICH TYPE II SUPERNOVAE

By Joseph P. Anderson, S. González-Gaitán, M. Hamuy, C. Guti'errez, M. Stritzinger, F. Olivares E., M. Phillips, S. Schulze, R. Antezana, Luis Bolt and 19 more. 2014

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an analysis of the diversity of V-band light-curves of hydrogen-rich type II supernovae. Analyzing a sample of 116 supernovae, several magnitude measurements are defined, together with decline rates at different epochs, and time durations of different phases. It is found that magnitudes measured at maximum light correlate more strongly with decline rates than those measured at other epochs: brighter supernovae at maximum generally have faster declining light-curves at all epochs. We find a relation between the decline rate during the “plateau” phase and peak magnitudes, which has a dispersion of 0.56 mag, offering the prospect of using type II supernovae as purely photometric distance indicators. Our analysis suggests that the type II population spans a continuum from low-luminosity events which have flat light-curves during the “plateau” stage, through to the brightest events which decline much faster. A large range in optically thick phase durations is observed, implying a range in progenitor envelope masses at the epoch of explosion. During the radioactive tails, we find many supernovae with faster declining light-curves than expected from full trapping of radioactive emission, implying low mass ejecta. It is suggested that the main driver of light-curve diversity is the extent of hydrogen envelopes retained before explosion. Finally, a new classification scheme is introduced where hydrogen-rich events are typed as simply “SN II” with an “s2” value giving the decline rate during the “plateau” phase, indicating its morphological type.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7bda298d2681c5e371cebd9bca88b3e12b38d1e9

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Smartt
2. A. Filippenko
3. Ryan Chornock
4. E. Berger
5. N. Smith
6. Weidong Li
7. R. Kirshner
8. S. Valenti

In Instrumentation

1. Weidong Li
2. A. Filippenko
3. Ryan Chornock
4. N. Smith
5. S. Valenti
6. M. Hamuy
7. S. Smartt
8. Morgan Fraser

Citations in the corpus

• Unifying Type II Supernova Light Curves with Dense Circumstellar Material (2016, background): “In this picture, continuous transition between the SNe IIP and IIL (Anderson et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015) is naturally explained by the continuity in the wind properties of the progenitors.”
• TOWARD CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TYPE IIP SUPERNOVA PROGENITOR POPULATION: A STATISTICAL SAMPLE OF LIGHT CURVES FROM Pan-STARRS1 (2014, methodology): “Using a similarly sized sample, Anderson et al. (2014) have reported independent results in agreement with the continuum of decline rates we report here.”
• The Carnegie Supernova Project. I. Third Photometry Data Release of Low-redshift Type Ia Supernovae and Other White Dwarf Explosions (2017, methodology): “Preliminary V-band light curves for this sample have already been published by Anderson et al. (2014), and CSP-I observations of two SN1987A-like events were presented by Taddia et al. (2012).”
• The diversity of Type II supernova versus the similarity in their progenitors (2016, methodology): “Olivares et al. (2010) and Anderson et al. (2014) used a similar function to estimate tPT that includes three additional parameters to reproduce the first month of the light curve.”
• Measuring the Progenitor Masses and Dense Circumstellar Material of Type II Supernovae (2017, background): “…breakthrough came when Valenti et al. (2015) demonstrated that if one simply follows an SN IIL long enough, its light curve will drop at ∼100 days, just like a normal SN IIP (previous SNe IIL studies rarely followed the light curve beyond ∼80 days from discovery; see also Anderson et al. 2014).”