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Published August 17, 2007 | Submitted + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Detection of Circumstellar Material in a Normal Type Ia Supernova

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae are important cosmological distance indicators. Each of these bright supernovae supposedly results from the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star that, after accreting material from a companion star, exceeds some mass limit, but the true nature of the progenitor star system remains controversial. Here we report the spectroscopic detection of circumstellar material in a normal type Ia supernova explosion. The expansion velocities, densities, and dimensions of the circumstellar envelope indicate that this material was ejected from the progenitor system. In particular, the relatively low expansion velocities suggest that the white dwarf was accreting material from a companion star that was in the red-giant phase at the time of the explosion.

Additional Information

© 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 26 March 2007; accepted 29 June 2007 Published online 12 July 2007. We thank K. Krisciunas for providing information about the photometric evolution of SN 2006X. We acknowledge K. Steenbrugge, F. Primas, W. M. Wood-Vasey, R. Corradi, G. J. Ferland, P. van Hoof, F. Bresolin, and C. Stockdale for useful discussions. We particularly thank M. F. Bode for sharing some results on RS Ophiuchi before publication. This work is based on observations made with ESO telescopes at Paranal Observatory, obtained under run IDs 276.D-5048, 277.D-5003, and 277.D-5013. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and NASA. This work made use of the Very Large Array telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is operated by Associated Universities, Incorporated, under a cooperative agreement with NSF. P.C. is a Jansky Fellow of the NRAO.

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Submitted - 0707.2793.pdf

Supplemental Material - Patat.SOM.pdf

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August 19, 2023
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