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Published June 1, 2007 | Published
Journal Article Open

On the Progenitors of Two Type II-P Supernovae in the Virgo Cluster

Abstract

Direct identification of the progenitors of supernovae (SNe) is rare because of the required spatial resolution and depth of the archival data prior to the SN explosions. Here we report on the identification of the progenitors of two nearby SNe in the Virgo Cluster: SN 2006my in NGC 4651 and SN 2006ov in M61. We obtained high-quality ground-based images of SN 2006my with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and are able to locate the site of the SN on pre-SN Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images to a high precision (1 σ uncertainty of ±0.05"). We pinpoint the site of SN 2006ov to within 0.02" from HST Advanced Camera for Surveys images of the SN. We detected a red supergiant progenitor for each SN within the error circles, with an inferred zero-age main-sequence mass (M_(zams)) of 10^(+5)_(-3) and 15^(+5)_(-3) M_⊙ for the progenitors of SNe 2006my and 2006ov, respectively. The mass estimates for the progenitors of both SNe confirm a suggested trend that the most common Type II-plateau SNe originate from low-mass supergiants with M_(zams) ≈ 8-20 M_⊙.

Additional Information

© 2007 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2007 January 2; accepted 2007 February 14. We thank Louis Desroches, Mohan Ganeshalingam, Jennifer Hoffman, Douglas Leonard, Frank Serduke, Jeffery Silverman, and Diane Wong for obtaining and reducing the optical spectra of SNe used in this paper with the 3 m Shane reflector at Lick Observatory. The work of A. V. F.'s group at U. C. Berkeley is supported by National Science Foundation grant AST 06-07485, and by the TABASGO Foundation. Additional funding is provided by NASA through grants AR-10690, AR-10952, and GO-10877 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. KAIT was made possible by generous donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the National Science Foundation, the University of California, and the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation.

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