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Published March 10, 2022 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Physical Properties of the Host Galaxies of Ca-rich Transients

Abstract

Calcium-rich (Ca-rich) transients are a new class of supernovae (SNe) that are known for their comparatively rapid evolution, modest peak luminosities, and strong nebular calcium emission lines. Currently, the progenitor systems of Ca-rich transients remain unknown. Although they exhibit spectroscopic properties not unlike core-collapse Type Ib/c SNe, nearly half are found in the outskirts of their host galaxies, which are predominantly elliptical, suggesting a closer connection to the older stellar populations of SNe Ia. In this paper, we present a compilation of publicly available multiwavelength observations of all known and/or suspected host galaxies of Ca-rich transients ranging from far-UV to IR, and use these data to characterize their stellar populations with prospector. We estimate several galaxy parameters including integrated star formation rate, stellar mass, metallicity, and age. For nine host galaxies, the observations are sensitive enough to obtain nonparametric star formation histories, from which we recover SN rates and estimate probabilities that the Ca-rich transients in each of these host galaxies originated from a core-collapse versus Type Ia-like explosion. Our work supports the notion that the population of Ca-rich transients do not come exclusively from core-collapse explosions, and must either be only from white dwarf stars or a mixed population of white dwarf stars with other channels, potentially including massive star explosions. Additional photometry and explosion site spectroscopy of larger samples of Ca-rich host galaxies will improve these estimates and better constrain the ratio of white dwarf versus massive star progenitors of Ca-rich transients.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 September 20; revised 2022 February 3; accepted 2022 February 4; published 2022 March 17. D.M. acknowledges NSF support from grants PHY-1914448 and AST-2037297. We are grateful to Samir Salim for useful discussions of photometric data and catalog usage. Y.D. thanks Niharika Sravan, Mark Linvill, Alexander M. Warner, and Nabeel Rehemtulla for programming and plotting assistance. W.J-G is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. DGE-1842165. W.J-G acknowledges support through NASA grants in support of Hubble Space Telescope programs GO-16075 and GO-16500. S.K.S. acknowledges support from NSF AST-1907790 and the Packard Foundation. This research has made use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. We also used the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 526555. Software: Prospector (Leja et al. 2017), Python-fsps (Conroy & Gunn 2010; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2014), dynesty (Speagle 2020), SAOImage DS9 (Joye & Mandel 2003).

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Published - Dong_2022_ApJ_927_199.pdf

Accepted Version - 2202.03449.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023