TOWARD CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TYPE IIP SUPERNOVA PROGENITOR POPULATION: A STATISTICAL SAMPLE OF LIGHT CURVES FROM Pan-STARRS1

By N. Sanders, A. Soderberg, S. Gezari, M. Betancourt, Ryan Chornock, E. Berger, R. Foley, P. Challis, M. Drout, R. Kirshner and 23 more. 2014

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, wide-field sky surveys providing deep multiband imaging have presented a new path for indirectly characterizing the progenitor populations of core-collapse supernovae (SNe): systematic light-curve studies. We assemble a set of 76 grizy-band Type IIP SN light curves from Pan-STARRS1, obtained over a constant survey program of 4 yr and classified using both spectroscopy and machine-learning-based photometric techniques. We develop and apply a new Bayesian model for the full multiband evolution of each light curve in the sample. We find no evidence of a subpopulation of fast-declining explosions (historically referred to as “Type IIL” SNe). However, we identify a highly significant relation between the plateau phase decay rate and peak luminosity among our SNe IIP. These results argue in favor of a single parameter, likely determined by initial stellar mass, predominantly controlling the explosions of red supergiants. This relation could also be applied for SN cosmology, offering a standardizable candle good to an intrinsic scatter of ≲ 0.2 mag. We compare each light curve to physical models from hydrodynamic simulations to estimate progenitor initial masses and other properties of the Pan-STARRS1 Type IIP SN sample. We show that correction of systematic discrepancies between modeled and observed SN IIP light-curve properties and an expanded grid of progenitor properties are needed to enable robust progenitor inferences from multiband light-curve samples of this kind. This work will serve as a pathfinder for photometric studies of core-collapse SNe to be conducted through future wide-field transient searches.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd0f76e1c7dd61fb9f1080d159fae726f6e2d952

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Smartt
2. S. Valenti
3. A. Piro
4. V. Morozova
5. Nozomu Tominaga
6. A. Filippenko
7. Morgan Fraser
8. I. Arcavi

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the Progenitor Masses and Dense Circumstellar Material of Type II Supernovae (2017, background): “There have been some claims of distinct populations (Arcavi et al. 2012; Faran et al. 2014a, 2014b), but support for the more continuous case has increased as larger compilations by Anderson et al. (2014) and Sanders et al. (2015) showed a more continuous range of early light-curve slopes.”
• The diversity of Type II supernova versus the similarity in their progenitors (2016, background): “Some authors suggest that they form a continuous distribution (Patat et al. 1994; Anderson et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015; Valenti et al. 2015), while others favour their separation into distinct classes (Arcavi et al. 2012; Faran et al. 2014a,b).”
• 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.”
• PHOTOMETRIC SUPERNOVA CLASSIFICATION WITH MACHINE LEARNING (2016, background): “We also considered the linear piecewise model proposed in Sanders et al. (2015) but found that the relatively large number of parameters (11 per filter) made it less robust when fitting to data, and consequently classification with this feature set did not typically perform well.”
• J-GEM observations of an electromagnetic counterpart to the neutron star merger GW170817 (2017, methodology): “Figure 3 shows the z-band light curves for SSS17a, Type Ia supernova (SN Ia: Nugent et al. 2002), Type II plateau supernova (SN IIP: Sanders et al. 2015), and three kilonova models with an ejecta mass of Mej = 0.01 M as mentioned by Tanaka et al. (2017a).”