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Published May 18, 2023 | Published + Supplemental Material
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A radio-detected type Ia supernova with helium-rich circumstellar material

Kool, Erik C. ORCID icon
Johansson, Joel ORCID icon
Sollerman, Jesper ORCID icon
Moldón, Javier ORCID icon
Moriya, Takashi J. ORCID icon
Mattila, Seppo ORCID icon
Schulze, Steve ORCID icon
Chomiuk, Laura ORCID icon
Pérez-Torres, Miguel ORCID icon
Harris, Chelsea ORCID icon
Lundqvist, Peter ORCID icon
Graham, Matthew ORCID icon
Yang, Sheng ORCID icon
Perley, Daniel A. ORCID icon
Strotjohann, Nora Linn ORCID icon
Fremling, Christoffer ORCID icon
Gal-Yam, Avishay ORCID icon
Lezmy, Jeremy
Maguire, Kate ORCID icon
Omand, Conor ORCID icon
Smith, Mathew ORCID icon
Andreoni, Igor ORCID icon
Bellm, Eric C. ORCID icon
Bloom, Joshua S. ORCID icon
De, Kishalay ORCID icon
Groom, Steven L. ORCID icon
Kasliwal, Mansi M. ORCID icon
Masci, Frank J. ORCID icon
Medford, Michael S. ORCID icon
Park, Sungmin
Purdum, Josiah ORCID icon
Reynolds, Thomas M.
Riddle, Reed ORCID icon
Robert, Estelle ORCID icon
Ryder, Stuart D. ORCID icon
Sharma, Yashvi ORCID icon
Stern, Daniel ORCID icon
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Abstract

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are thermonuclear explosions of degenerate white dwarf stars destabilized by mass accretion from a companion star, but the nature of their progenitors remains poorly understood. A way to discriminate between progenitor systems is through radio observations; a non-degenerate companion star is expected to lose material through winds or binary interaction before explosion, and the supernova ejecta crashing into this nearby circumstellar material should result in radio synchrotron emission. However, despite extensive efforts, no type Ia supernova (SN Ia) has ever been detected at radio wavelengths, which suggests a clean environment and a companion star that is itself a degenerate white dwarf star. Here we report on the study of SN 2020eyj, a SN Ia showing helium-rich circumstellar material, as demonstrated by its spectral features, infrared emission and, for the first time in a SN Ia to our knowledge, a radio counterpart. On the basis of our modelling, we conclude that the circumstellar material probably originates from a single-degenerate binary system in which a white dwarf accretes material from a helium donor star, an often proposed formation channel for SNe Ia (refs. 6,7). We describe how comprehensive radio follow-up of SN 2020eyj-like SNe Ia can improve the constraints on their progenitor systems.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 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 licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence 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 licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. We thank L. Dessart, M. Barlow and J. Nordin for helpful feedback and discussions and T. Szalai for providing us with their mid-infrared Spitzer light curves. E.C.K. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, financed by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, project number 2016-06012; the research project grant 'Understanding the Dynamic Universe' financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation under Dnr KAW 2018.0067; and The Wenner-Gren Foundations.J.M. and M.P.-T. acknowledge financial support from the grant CEX2021-001131-S, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, and from the grant IAA4SKA (ref. R18-RT-3082) from the Economic Transformation, Industry, Knowledge and Universities Council of the Regional Government of Andalusia and the European Regional Development Fund from the European Union. M.P.-T also acknowledges financial support through grant PID2020-117404GB-C21, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033. J.M. also acknowledges financial support from the grant PID2021-123930OB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, by "ERDF A way of making Europe" and by the "European Union". J.M. and M.P.-T. acknowledge the Spanish Prototype of an SRC (SPSRC) service and support financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, by the Regional Government of Andalusia, by the European Regional Development Funds and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. T.J.M. is supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP20H00174, JP21K13966, JP21H04997). L.C. and C.H. acknowledge support from NSF grants AST-1751874, AST-1907790 and AST-2107070. S.M. acknowledges support from the Academy of Finland project 350458. The research of A.G.-Y. is supported by the EU through European Research Council (ERC) grant no. 725161, the ISF GW excellence centre, an IMOS space infrastructure grant and BSF/Transformative and GIF grants, as well as the André Deloro Institute for Advanced Research in Space and Optics, the Schwartz/Reisman Collaborative Science Program and the Norman E Alexander Family M Foundation ULTRASAT Data Center Fund, The Kimmel Center for Planetary Sciences, Minerva and Yeda-Sela; A.G.-Y. is the incumbent of the Arlyn Imberman Professorial Chair. N.L.S. is financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through the Walter Benjamin programme—461903330. K.M. is supported by H2020 ERC Starting Grant no. 758638 (SUPERSTARS). E.R. has received funding from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 759194—USNAC). Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-in. and the 60-in. Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) project. The ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Centre 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, France, the University of Warwick, the University of Bochum and Northwestern University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC and UW. This work was supported by the GROWTH Marshal project153 financed by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1545949. SED Machine is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1106171. The ZTF forced-photometry service was financed under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant no. 12540303 (principal investigator: M. Graham). Based 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 Astrofisica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT. 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 Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. e-MERLIN is a National Facility operated by the University of Manchester at Jodrell Bank Observatory on behalf of STFC. This work has made use of data from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project. The ATLAS project is primarily funded to search for near-Earth asteroids through NASA grants NN12AR55G, 80NSSC18K0284 and 80NSSC18K1575; by-products of the NEO search include images and catalogues from the survey area. This work was partially financed by Kepler/K2 grant J1944/80NSSC19K0112 and HST GO-15889 and STFC grants ST/T000198/1 and ST/S006109/1. The ATLAS science products have been made possible through the contributions of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Queen's University Belfast, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), Chile. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant no. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant no. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. We acknowledge ESA Gaia, DPAC and the Photometric Science Alerts Team (http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts). Open access funding provided by Stockholm University. Data availability: The optical spectra of SN 2020eyj that support the findings of this study have been made available through the WISeREP archive (https://www.wiserep.org/object/14508). The ZTF photometry is listed in the Supplementary Information. Radio data from the electronic Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (e-MERLIN) have been made available on the Zenodo repository with identifier https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7665246. Data from the NEOWISE-R mission are available from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive with identifier https://doi.org/10.26131/IRSA124. Photometry from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) were obtained from a public source (https://fallingstar-data.com/forcedphot/). Code availability: On request, the corresponding author will provide the code used to produce the figures. The details of the models used in the 'Light-curve fits' and 'Optically thick wind' sections can be found in refs. 26,31,145 and references therein. Contributions: E.C.K. led the follow-up observations and is the primary author of the manuscript. J.J. conducted the spectral analysis and SN Ia light-curve modelling, and contributed to the source and infrared analysis. J.S. contributed substantially to the writing of the manuscript and the source analysis, and conducted follow-up observations with the NOT. J.M. and M.P.-T. led the radio observations and data analysis. T.J.M., L.C., C.H. and P.L. conducted the radio light-curve modelling. S.S. conducted the host-galaxy analysis. M.G. conducted follow-up observations with Keck. S.M. contributed to the writing and the infrared interpretation. S.Y. contributed to the data analysis. D.A.P. conducted follow-up observations with the Liverpool Telescope. N.L.S. conducted the precursor search. C.F., K.D. and Y.S. conducted follow-up observations. A.G.-Y. contributed to the writing and source analysis. J.L. and M.S. conducted the SEDM spectrum analysis. K.M., C.O., T.M.R. and S.D.R. contributed to the writing and source analysis. I.A., E.C.B., J.S.B., S.L.G., M.M.K., F.J.M., M.S.M., S.P., J.P., R.R. and D.S. are ZTF builders. All authors contributed to edits to the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests.

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