English

Characterizing Supernova Host Galaxies with FrankenBlast: A Scalable Tool for Transient Host Galaxy Association, Photometry, and Stellar Population Modeling

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-12-04 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present FrankenBlast, a customized and improved version of the Blast web application. FrankenBlast associates transients to their host galaxies, performs host photometry, and runs a innovative SED fitting code to constrain host stellar population properties--all within minutes per object. We test FrankenBlast on 14,432 supernovae (SNe), ~half of which are spectroscopically-classified, and are able to constrain host properties for 9262 events. When contrasting the host stellar masses (MM_*), specific star formation rates (sSFR), and host dust extinction (AVA_V) between spectroscopically and photometrically-classified SNe Ia, Ib/c, II, and IIn, we determine that deviations in these distributions are primarily due to misclassified events contaminating the photometrically-classified sample. We further show that the higher redshifts of the photometrically-classified sample also force their MM_* and sSFR distributions to deviate from those of the spectroscopically-classified sample, as these properties are redshift-dependent. We compare host properties between spectroscopically-classified SN populations and determine if they primarily trace MM_* or SFR. We find that all SN populations seem to both depend on MM_* and SFR, with SNe II and IIn somewhat more SFR-dependent than SNe Ia and Ib/c, and SNe Ia more MM_*-dependent than all other classes. We find the difference in the SNe Ib/c and II hosts the most intriguing and speculate that SNe Ib/c must be more dependent on higher MM_* and more evolved environments for the right conditions for progenitor formation. All data products and FrankenBlast are publicly available, along with a developing FrankenBlast version intended for Rubin Observatory science products.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.08874,
  title  = {Characterizing Supernova Host Galaxies with FrankenBlast: A Scalable Tool for Transient Host Galaxy Association, Photometry, and Stellar Population Modeling},
  author = {Anya E. Nugent and V. Ashley Villar and Alex Gagliano and David O. Jones and Asaf Horowicz and Kaylee de Soto and Bingjie Wang and Ben Margalit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08874},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

38 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, accepted to ApJ