A spectroscopically confirmed, strongly lensed, metal-poor Type II supernova at z = 5.13
Abstract
Observing supernovae (SNe) in the early Universe (z > 3) provides a window into how both galaxies and individual stars have evolved over cosmic time, yet a detailed study of high-redshift stars and SNe has remained difficult due to their extreme distances and cosmological redshifting. To overcome the former, searches for gravitationally lensed sources allow for the discovery of magnified SNe that appear as multiple images - further providing the opportunity for efficient follow-up. Here we present the discovery of "SN Eos": a strongly lensed, multiply-imaged, SN II at a spectroscopic redshift of z = 5.133 +/- 0.001. SN Eos exploded in a Lyman-{\alpha} emitting galaxy when the Universe was only ~1 billion years old, shortly after it reionized and became transparent to ultraviolet radiation. A year prior to our discovery in JWST data, archival HST imaging of SN Eos reveals rest-frame far ultraviolet (~1,300{\AA}) emission, indicative of shock breakout or interaction with circumstellar material in the first few (rest-frame) days after explosion. The JWST spectroscopy of SN Eos, now the farthest spectroscopically confirmed SN ever discovered, shows that SN Eos's progenitor star likely formed in a metal-poor environment (<= 0.1 Z_{\odot}), providing the first direct evidence of massive star formation in the metal-poor, early Universe. SN Eos would not have been detectable without the extreme lensing magnification of the system, highlighting the potential of such discoveries to eventually place constraints on the faint end of the cosmic star-formation rate density in the very early Universe.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.04156,
title = {A spectroscopically confirmed, strongly lensed, metal-poor Type II supernova at z = 5.13},
author = {David A. Coulter and Conor Larison and Justin D. R. Pierel and Seiji Fujimoto and Vasily Kokorev and Joseph F. V. Allingham and Takashi J. Moriya and Matthew Siebert and Yoshihisa Asada and Rachel Bezanson and Maruša Bradač and Gabriel Brammer and John Chisholm and Dan Coe and Pratika Dayal and Michael Engesser and Steven L. Finkelstein and Ori D. Fox and Lukas J. Furtak and Anton M. Koekemoer and Thomas Moore and Minami Nakane and Masami Ouchi and Richard Pan and Robert Quimby and Armin Rest and Johan Richard and Luke Robbins and Louis-Gregory Strolger and Fengwu Sun and Tommaso Treu and Hiroto Yanagisawa and Abdurro'uf and Aadya Agrawal and Ricardo Amorín and Joseph P. Anderson and Rodrigo Angulo and Hakim Atek and Franz E. Bauer and Larry D. Bradley and Volker Bromm and Mateusz Bronikowski and Christopher J. Conselice and Christa DeCoursey and James M. DerKacy and Guillaume Desprez and Suhail Dhawan and Jose M. Diego and Eiichi Egami and Andreas Faisst and Brenda Frye and Sebastian Gomez and Mauro González-Otero and Massimo Griggio and Yuichi Harikane and Kohei Inayoshi and Saurabh W. Jha and Yolanda Jiménez-Teja and Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe and Patrick L. Kelly and Lindsey A. Kwok and Zachary G. Lane and Xiaolong Li and Ivo Lobbe and Paulo A. A. Lopes and Ray A. Lucas and Georgios E. Magdis and Nicholas S. Martis and Jorryt Matthee and Ashish K. Meena and Rohan P. Naidu and Gaël Noirot and Masamune Oguri and Estefania Padilla Gonzalez and Massimo Pascale and Tanja Petrushevska and Massimo Ricotti and Daniel Schaerer and Stefan Schuldt and Melissa Shahbandeh and William Sheu and Koji Shukawa and Akiyoshi Tsujita and Eros Vanzella and Qinan Wang and John Weaver and Robert Williams and Rogier Windhorst and Yi Xu and Yossef Zenati and Adi Zitrin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04156},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
39 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Science