"Refsdal" meets Popper: comparing predictions of the re-appearance of the multiply imaged supernova behind MACSJ1149.5+2223

Creators: Treu, T.; Zitrin, A.

Abstract

Supernova "Refsdal," multiply imaged by cluster MACS1149.5+2223, represents a rare opportunity to make a true blind test of model predictions in extragalactic astronomy, on a timescale that is short compared to a human lifetime. In order to take advantage of this event, we produced seven gravitational lens models with five independent methods, based on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Hubble Frontier Field images, along with extensive spectroscopic follow-up observations by HST, the Very Large and the Keck Telescopes. We compare the model predictions and show that they agree reasonably well with the measured time delays and magnification ratios between the known images, even though these quantities were not used as input. This agreement is encouraging, considering that the models only provide statistical uncertainties, and do not include additional sources of uncertainties such as structure along the line of sight, cosmology, and the mass sheet degeneracy. We then present the model predictions for the other appearances of supernova "Refsdal." A future image will reach its peak in the first half of 2016, while another image appeared between 1994 and 2004. The past image would have been too faint to be detected in existing archival images. The future image should be approximately one-third as bright as the brightest known image (i.e., H_(AB) ≈ 25.7 mag at peak and H_(AB) ≈ 26.7 mag six months before peak), and thus detectable in single-orbit HST images. We will find out soon whether our predictions are correct.

Additional Information

© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 October 19; accepted 2015 November 24; published 2016 January 20. The authors thank Raphael Gavazzi, Mathilde Jauzac, and Jens Hjorth for insightful comments on the manuscript. This work is supported by NASA through grants HST-GO-13459 and HST-GO-14041 from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. T.T. gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the American Academy in Rome and of the Observatorio di Monteporzio Catone, where parts of this manuscript were written. T.T. is supported by the Packard Foundation in the form of a Packard Research Fellowship. J.M.D. is grateful for support from the consolider project CSD2010-00064 and AYA2012-39475-C02-01 funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad. A.V.F.ʼs research is supported by the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, and NSF grant AST-1211916. C.G. acknowledges support by the VILLUM FONDEN Young Investigator Programme through grant no. 10123. Support for A.Z. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant #HSTHF2-51334.001-A awarded by STScI. The work of M.O. was supported in part by World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the JSPS (26800093). Financial support for this work was provided to S.A.R. by NASA through grants HST-HF-51312 and HST-GO-13386 from STScI. A.H. is supported by NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program, grant ASTRO14F-0007. R.J.F. gratefully acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-1518052, NASA grants HST-GO-14041 and HST-GO-13386, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This work was supported in part by a NASA Keck PI Data Award (PID 47/2014B_N125D, PI Jha). We are very grateful to the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope for their assistance in planning, scheduling, and executing the HST observations used in this work. We thank the STScI and ESO directors for granting Directory Discretionary time to allow for timely follow-up observations of SN Refsdal. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory from telescope time allocated to NASA through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California; the Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

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Submitted - 1510.05750v2.pdf

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