DES13S2cmm: The First Superluminous Supernova from the Dark Energy Survey
Abstract
We present DES13S2cmm, the first spectroscopically-confirmed superluminous supernova (SLSN) from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We briefly discuss the data and search algorithm used to find this event in the first year of DES operations, and outline the spectroscopic data obtained from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope to confirm its redshift (z = 0.663 +/- 0.001 based on the host-galaxy emission lines) and likely spectral type (type I). Using this redshift, we find M_U_peak = -21.05 +0.10 -0.09 for the peak, rest-frame U-band absolute magnitude, and find DES13S2cmm to be located in a faint, low metallicity (sub-solar), low stellar-mass host galaxy (log(M/M_sun) = 9.3 +/- 0.3); consistent with what is seen for other SLSNe-I. We compare the bolometric light curve of DES13S2cmm to fourteen similarly well-observed SLSNe-I in the literature and find it possesses one of the slowest declining tails (beyond +30 days rest frame past peak), and is the faintest at peak. Moreover, we find the bolometric light curves of all SLSNe-I studied herein possess a dispersion of only 0.2-0.3 magnitudes between +25 and +30 days after peak (rest frame) depending on redshift range studied; this could be important for 'standardising' such supernovae, as is done with the more common type Ia. We fit the bolometric light curve of DES13S2cmm with two competing models for SLSNe-I - the radioactive decay of 56Ni, and a magnetar - and find that while the magnetar is formally a better fit, neither model provides a compelling match to the data. Although we are unable to conclusively differentiate between these two physical models for this particular SLSN-I, further DES observations of more SLSNe-I should break this degeneracy, especially if the light curves of SLSNe-I can be observed beyond 100 days in the rest frame of the supernova.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.07232,
title = {DES13S2cmm: The First Superluminous Supernova from the Dark Energy Survey},
author = {A. Papadopoulos and C. B. D'Andrea and M. Sullivan and R. C. Nichol and K. Barbary and R. Biswas and P. J. Brown and R. A. Covarrubias and D. A. Finley and J. A. Fischer and R. J. Foley and D. Goldstein and R. R. Gupta and R. Kessler and E. Kovacs and S. E. Kuhlmann and C. Lidman and M. March and P. E. Nugent and M. Sako and R. C. Smith and H. Spinka and W. Wester and T. M. C. Abbott and F. Abdalla and S. S. Allam and M. Banerji and J. P. Bernstein and R. A. Bernstein and A. Carnero and L. N. da Costa and D. L. DePoy and S. Desai and H. T. Diehl and T. Eifler and A. E. Evrard and B. Flaugher and J. A. Frieman and D. Gerdes and D. Gruen and K. Honscheid and D. James and K. Kuehn and N. Kuropatkin and O. Lahav and M. A. G. Maia and M. Makler and J. L. Marshall and K. W. Merritt and C. J. Miller and R. Miquel and R. Ogando and A. A. Plazas and N. A. Roe and A. K. Romer and E. Rykoff and E. Sanchez and B. X. Santiago and V. Scarpine and M. Schubnell and I. Sevilla and M. Soares- Santos and E. Suchyta and M. Swanson and G. Tarle and J. Thaler and D. L. Tucker and R. H. Wechsler and J. Zuntz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.07232},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted by MNRAS (2015 January 23), 13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables