The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is systematically charting the optical transient and variable sky. A primary science driver of PTF is building a complete inventory of transients in the local Universe (distance less than 200 Mpc). Here, we report the discovery of PTF10fqs, a transient in the luminosity "gap" between novae and supernovae. Located on a spiral arm of Messier 99, PTF 10fqs has a peak luminosity of Mr = -12.3, red color (g-r = 1.0) and is slowly evolving (decayed by 1 mag in 68 days). It has a spectrum dominated by intermediate-width H (930 km/s) and narrow calcium emission lines. The explosion signature (the light curve and spectra) is overall similar to thatof M85OT2006-1, SN2008S, and NGC300OT. The origin of these events is shrouded in mystery and controversy (and in some cases, in dust). PTF10fqs shows some evidence of a broad feature (around 8600A) that may suggest very large velocities (10,000 km/s) in this explosion. Ongoing surveys can be expected to find a few such events per year. Sensitive spectroscopy, infrared monitoring and statistics (e.g. disk versus bulge) will eventually make it possible for astronomers to unravel the nature of these mysterious explosions.
@article{arxiv.1005.1455,
title = {PTF10fqs: A Luminous Red Nova in the Spiral Galaxy Messier 99},
author = {Mansi M. Kasliwal and S. R. Kulkarni and Iair Arcavi and Robert M. Quimby and Eran O. Ofek and Peter Nugent and Janet Jacobsen and Avishay Gal-Yam and Yoav Green and Ofer Yaron and Jacob L. Howell and Derek B. Fox and S. Bradley Cenko and Io Kleiser and Joshua S. Bloom and Adam Miller and Dovi Poznanski and Weidong Li and Alexei V. Filippenko and Dan Starr and Nicholas M. Law and George Helou and Dale A. Frail and James D. Neill and Karl Forster and D. Christopher Martin and Shriharsh P. Tendulkar and Neil Gehrels and Jamie Kennea and Mark Sullivan and Richard Dekany and Gustavo Rahmer and David Hale and Roger Smith and Jeff Zolkower and Viswa Velur and Richard Walters and John Henning and Kahnh Bui and Dan McKenna and Cullen Blake},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.1455},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
12 pages, 12 figures, Replaced with published version