The Massive Progenitor of the Type II-linear Supernova 2009kr

Creators: Elias-Rosa, Nancy; Van Dyk, Schuyler D.; Li, Weidong; Miller, Adam A.; Silverman, Jeffrey M.; Ganeshalingam, Mohan; Boden, Andrew F.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Vinkό, Jόzsef; Cuillandre, Jean-Charles; Filippenko, Alexei V.; Steele, Thea N.; Bloom, Joshua S.; Griffith, Christopher V.; Kleiser, Io K. W.; Foley, Ryan J.

Abstract

We present early-time photometric and spectroscopic observations of supernova (SN) 2009kr in NGC 1832. We find that its properties to date support its classification as Type II-linear (SN II-L), a relatively rare subclass of core-collapse supernovae (SNe). We have also identified a candidate for the SN progenitor star through comparison of pre-explosion, archival images taken with WFPC2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope with SN images obtained using adaptive optics plus NIRC2 on the 10 m Keck-II telescope. Although the host galaxy's substantial distance (~26 Mpc) results in large uncertainties in the relative astrometry, we find that if this candidate is indeed the progenitor, it is a highly luminous (M^0_V = –7.8 mag) yellow supergiant with initial mass ~18-24 M_⊙. This would be the first time that an SN II-L progenitor has been directly identified. Its mass may be a bridge between the upper initial mass limit for the more common Type II-plateau SNe and the inferred initial mass estimate for one Type II-narrow SN.

Additional Information

© 2010 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2009 December 16; accepted 2010 April 2; published 2010 April 16. Based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), obtained from the Data Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under NASA contract NAS 05-26555; the 6.5 m Magellan Clay Telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile; various telescopes at Lick Observatory; the 1.3 m PAIRITEL on Mt. Hopkins; the SMARTS Consortium 1.3 m telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Chile; the 3.6 m Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii; and the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and NASA, with generous financial support from the W. M. Keck Foundation. We thank C. Blake, S. B. Cenko, B. Cobb, E. Falco, M. Kandrashoff, J. Kong, M. Modjaz, D. Starr, and T. Yuan for their assistance. J.V. received support from Hungarian OTKA Grant K76816, NSF Grant AST-0707769, and Texas Advanced Research Project grant ARP-0094. A.V.F.'s group and KAIT are supported by NSF grant AST-0908886, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation, the TABASGO Foundation, and NASA through grants AR-11248 and GO-10877 from STScI. PAIRITEL is operated by SAO with support from the Harvard University Milton Fund, UC Berkeley, University of Virginia, and NASA/Swift grant NNX09AQ66G. J.S.B. and his group are partially funded by a DOE SciDAC grant. Facilities: HST (WFPC2); KAIT; Nickel; Shane; CFHT(MegaCam); Keck:I(LRIS); Keck:II(NIRC2+AO, DEIMOS); CTIO:1.3m(SMARTS); Magellan:Clay(MagE)

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