Uncovering a population of gravitational lens galaxies with magnified standard candle SN Zwicky

Creators: Goobar, Ariel; Johansson, Joel; Schulze, Steve; Arendse, Nikki; Sagués Carracedo, Ana; Dhawan, Suhail; Mörtsell, Edvard; Fremling, Christoffer; Yan, Lin; Perley, Daniel; Sollerman, Jesper; Joseph, Rémy; Hinds, K-Ryan; Meynardie, William; Andreoni, Igor; Bellm, Eric; Bloom, Josh; Collett, Thomas E.; Drake, Andrew; Graham, Matthew; Kasliwal, Mansi; Kulkarni, Shri R.; Lemon, Cameron; Miller, Adam A.; Neill, James D.; Nordin, Jakob; Pierel, Justin; Richard, Johan; Riddle, Reed; Rigault, Mickael; Rusholme, Ben; Sharma, Yashvi; Stein, Robert; Stewart, Gabrielle; Townsend, Alice; Vinko, Jozsef; Wheeler, J. Craig; Wold, Avery

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Abstract

Detecting gravitationally lensed supernovae is among the biggest challenges in astronomy. It involves a combination of two very rare phenomena: catching the transient signal of a stellar explosion in a distant galaxy and observing it through a nearly perfectly aligned foreground galaxy that deflects light towards the observer. Here we describe how high-cadence optical observations with the Zwicky Transient Facility, with its unparalleled large field of view, led to the detection of a multiply imaged type Ia supernova, SN Zwicky, also known as SN 2022qmx. Magnified nearly 25-fold, the system was found thanks to the standard candle nature of type Ia supernovae. High-spatial-resolution imaging with the Keck telescope resolved four images of the supernova with very small angular separation, corresponding to an Einstein radius of only θ_E = 0.167″ and almost identical arrival times. The small θ_E and faintness of the lensing galaxy are very unusual, highlighting the importance of supernovae to fully characterize the properties of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses, including the impact of galaxy substructures.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This work is based on observations obtained with the 48 in. Samuel Oschin Telescope and the 60 in. telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the ZTF project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, the University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum and Northwestern University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC and UW. SEDM is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 1106171. This work has been supported by the research project grant 'Understanding the Dynamic Universe' funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation under Dnr KAW 2018.0067, and the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, project 2016-06012. M.R. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 759194—USNAC). A.G. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council under contract 2020-03444. E.M. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council under contract 2020-03384. T.E.C. is funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (LensEra: grant agreement 945536). This work is also based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under ESO programmes 109.234A.001 and 109.24FN, and on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. Some of the data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Optical Telescope. Some 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 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. This paper is also based in part on observations with the NASA/ESA HST obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at STScI; support was provided to J.P. through programme HST-GO-16264. Open access funding provided by Stockholm University. Contributions. A.G., project lead, telescope proposals, main manuscript editor; J.J., S.S., N.A., A.S.C., S.D., E.M., data analysis, proposal contribution, figures, manuscript text; C.F., L.Y., W.M., Keck AO imaging; D.P., K.-R.H., Liverpool Telescope observations; J.S., Nordic Optical Telescope observations; R.J., I.A., data analysis; T.E.C., C.L., manuscript contribution; E.B., J.B., A.D., M.G., M.K., S.R.K., A.A.M., J.D.N., J.N., R.R., M.R., B.R., G.S., A.T., A.W., ZTF observations; Y.S., R.S., Keck spectroscopy; Y.V., J.C.W., follow-up observations; J.P., HST observations. J.R., Very Large Telescope observations. Data availability. The reduced spectra and lightcurves used in the paper are available through the WISeREP repository68 at https://www.wiserep.org/object/21343. The raw VLT data are also available from the ESO Science Archive Facility, http://archive.eso.org/eso/eso_archive_main.html, program ID: 109.234A. Code availability. The data were analysed using the public codes SNTD (https://sntd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and lenstronomy (https://lenstronomy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). The Keck AO J-band images and analysis software can be requested from the first author. The Liverpool image reduction software will be made available upon publication by K-Taggart et al. The authors declare no competing interests.

Errata

In the version of this article initially published, the given name of Jozsef Vinko was misspelled as Yozsef and has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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