English

Visibility stacking in the quest for SNIa radio emission

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-05-28 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We describe the process of stacking radio interferometry visibilities to form a deep composite image and its application to the observation of transient phenomena. We apply "visibility stacking" to 46 archival Very Large Array observations of nearby type Ia supernovae (SNeIa). This new approach provides an upper limit on the SNIa ensemble peak radio luminosity of 1.2x10^{25}erg/s/Hz at 5GHz, which is 5-10 times lower than previously measured. This luminosity implies an upper limit on the average companion stellar wind mass loss rate of 1.3x10^{-7}M_o/yr. This mass loss rate is consistent with the double degenerate scenario for SNeIa and rules out intermediate and high mass companions in the single degenerate scenario. In the era of time domain astronomy, techniques such as visibility stacking will be important in extracting the maximum amount of information from observations of populations of short lived events.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.6188,
  title  = {Visibility stacking in the quest for SNIa radio emission},
  author = {Paul Hancock and Bryan M. Gaensler and Tara Murphy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.6188},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

9 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters