English

Radiative Transfer Modeling of An SN 1987A Light Echo$-$AT2019xis

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2021-10-04 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We use a Monte Carlo radiative transfer model (MCRTM) to simulate the UBVRI light curves, images and linear polarization of a light echo from supernova SN ~1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using various dust cloud shapes, sizes, and optical properties. We compare the theoretical simulations to the observations of AT2019xis, a light echo detected at a large angular distance (4.05^{'}) from SN ~1987A. We estimate the size and optical thickness of the dust cloud based on the simulation results and the observations of Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE-IV) Transient Detection System (OTDS) I-band light curve. The mass of the dust cloud is calculated using the estimated size, optical thickness and extinction coefficient. If the dust cloud is assumed to correspond to a gas-to-dust ratio of 300, the total mass of the dust cloud is approximately 7.8-9.3 MM_{\odot}. Based on these theoretical models, we show that the morphological shapes of the light echoes in the wavelength range in or shorter than the U-band to be very different from those in the longer wavelength bands, and the difference carries important information on the early UV radiation of SN ~1987A.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.01026,
  title  = {Radiative Transfer Modeling of An SN 1987A Light Echo$-$AT2019xis},
  author = {Jiachen Ding and Lifan Wang and Peter Brown and Ping Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.01026},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

21 pages, 20 figures, accepted to ApJ. Corrected several typos