Evidence for a Compact Wolf-Rayet Progenitor for the Type Ic Supernova PTF 10vgv

Creators: Corsi, A.; Ofek, E. O.; Gal-Yam, A.; Frail, D. A.; Poznanski, D.; Mazzali, P. A.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Kasliwal, M. M.; Arcavi, I.; Ben-Ami, S.; Cenko, S. B.; Filippenko, A. V.; Fox, D. B.; Horesh, A.; Howell, J. L.; Kleiser, I. K. W.; Nakar, E.; Rabinak, I.; Sari, R.; Silverman, J. M.; Xu, D.; Bloom, J. S.; Law, N. M.; Nugent, P. E.; Quimby, R. M.

Style

An error occurred while generating the citation.

Abstract

We present the discovery of PTF 10vgv, a Type Ic supernova (SN) detected by the Palomar Transient Factory, using the Palomar 48 inch telescope (P48). R-band observations of the PTF 10vgv field with P48 probe the SN emission from its very early phases (about two weeks before R-band maximum) and set limits on its flux in the week prior to the discovery. Our sensitive upper limits and early detections constrain the post-shock-breakout luminosity of this event. Via comparison to numerical (analytical) models, we derive an upper-limit of R ≾ 4.5 R_☉ (R ≾ 1 R_☉) on the radius of the progenitor star, a direct indication in favor of a compact Wolf-Rayet star. Applying a similar analysis to the historical observations of SN 1994I yields R ≾ 1/4 R_☉ for the progenitor radius of this SN.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 October 25; accepted 2012 January 4; published 2012 February 8. We thank Boaz Katz and Eli Waxman for useful comments. PTF is a collaboration of Caltech, LCOGT, the Weizmann Institute, LBNL, Oxford, Columbia, IPAC, and UC Berkeley. Staff and computational resources were provided by NERSC, supported by the DOE Office of Science. Lick Observatory and the Kast spectrograph are operated by the University of California. HET and its LRS are supported by UT Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford, Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and the Instituto de Astronomia de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. The EVLA is operated by NRAO for the NSF, under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. We thank the staffs of the above observatories for their assistance. A.G. and S.R.K. acknowledge support from the BSF; A.G. further acknowledges support from the ISF, FP7/IRG, Minerva, the Sieff Foundation, and the German–Israeli Fund (GIF). A.V.F. and his group at UC Berkeley acknowledge generous financial assistance from Gary & Cynthia Bengier, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, and NSF grant AST-0908886. A.C. acknowledges support from LIGO, which was constructed by Caltech and MIT with funding from the NSF under cooperative agreementPHY-0757058, and partial support from NASA/Swift grant NNH10ZDA001N.

Attached Files

Published - Corsi2012p17629Astrophys_J_Lett.pdf

Files

Corsi2012p17629Astrophys_J_Lett.pdf

Files (417.4 kB)

Name	Size	Download all
Corsi2012p17629Astrophys_J_Lett.pdf md5:f36409994a0987e6f10d8d0bad861d5c	417.4 kB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	27	27
Downloads	14	14
Data volume	6.3 MB	6.3 MB