Hiramatsu, Daichi and Howell, D. Andrew and Van Dyk, Schuyler D. and Goldberg, Jared A. and Maeda, Keiichi and Moriya, Takashi J. and Tominaga, Nozomu and Nomoto, Ken'ichi and Hosseinzadeh, Griffin and Arcavi, Iair and McCully, Curtis and Burke, Jamison and Bostroem, K. Azalee and Valenti, Stefano and Dong, Yize and Brown, Peter J. and Andrews, Jennifer E. and Bilinski, Christopher and Williams, G. Grant and Smith, Paul S. and Smith, Nathan and Sand, David J. and Anand, Gagandeep S. and Xu, Chengyuan and Filippenko, Alexei V. and Bersten, Melina C. and Folatelli, Gastón and Kelly, Patrick L. and Noguchi, Toshihide and Itagaki, Koichi (2021) The electron-capture origin of supernova 2018zd. Nature Astronomy, 5 (9). pp. 903-910. ISSN 2397-3366. doi:10.1038/s41550-021-01384-2. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20210202-095214084
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Abstract
In the transitional mass range (~8–10 solar masses) between white dwarf formation and iron core-collapse supernovae, stars are expected to produce an electron-capture supernova. Theoretically, these progenitors are thought to be super-asymptotic giant branch stars with a degenerate O + Ne + Mg core, and electron capture onto Ne and Mg nuclei should initiate core collapse. However, no supernovae have unequivocally been identified from an electron-capture origin, partly because of uncertainty in theoretical predictions. Here we present six indicators of electron-capture supernovae and show that supernova 2018zd is the only known supernova with strong evidence for or consistent with all six: progenitor identification, circumstellar material, chemical composition, explosion energy, light curve and nucleosynthesis. For supernova 2018zd, we infer a super-asymptotic giant branch progenitor based on the faint candidate in the pre-explosion images and the chemically enriched circumstellar material revealed by the early ultraviolet colours and flash spectroscopy. The light-curve morphology and nebular emission lines can be explained by the low explosion energy and neutron-rich nucleosynthesis produced in an electron-capture supernova. This identification provides insights into the complex stellar evolution, supernova physics, cosmic nucleosynthesis and remnant populations in the transitional mass range.
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| Additional Information: | © 2021 Nature Publishing Group. Received 23 November 2020; Accepted 30 April 2021; Published 28 June 2021. We are grateful to A. Suzuki, T. Takiwaki, T. Nozawa, M. Tanaka, C. Kobayashi, R. Ouchi, T. Matsuoka, T. Hayakawa, S. I. Blinnikov, K. Chen, L. Bildsten and B. Paxton for comments and discussions, to C. P. Gutiérrez and A. Pastorello for sharing the velocity data of the type II SN sample and SN 2005cs (respectively), and to P. Iláš for creating the colour-composite image. D.H., D.A.H., G.H., C.M. and J.B. were supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants AST-1313484 and AST-1911225, as well as by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant 80NSSC19kf1639. D.H. is thankful for support and hospitality by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) where many discussions of this work took place. J.A.G. is supported by the NSF GRFP under grant 1650114. K.M. acknowledges support by JSPS KAKENHI grants 20H00174, 20H04737, 18H04585, 18H05223 and 17H02864. K.N.’s work and D.H.’s visit to Kavli IPMU have been supported by the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, and JSPS KAKENHI grants JP17K05382 and JP20K04024, Japan. I.A. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe Program and acknowledges support from that programme, from the Israel Science Foundation (grants 2108/18 and 2752/19), from the United States – Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and from the Israeli Council for Higher Education Alon Fellowship. Research by K.A.B., S.V. and Y.D. is supported by NSF grant AST-1813176. J.E.A. and N.S. receive support from NSF grant AST-1515559. Research by D.J.S. is supported by NSF grants AST-1821967, 1821987, 1813708, 1813466 and 1908972. G.S.A. acknowledges support from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) Visiting Graduate Student Fellowship and from NASA/HST grant SNAP-15922 from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A.V.F. is grateful for financial assistance from the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, and the UC Berkeley Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (where he is a Senior Miller Fellow); additional funding was provided by NASA/HST grant AR-14295 from STScI. G.F. acknowledges support from CONICET through grant PIP-2015-2017-11220150100746CO and from ANPCyT through grant PICT-2017-3133. This paper made use of data from the Las Cumbres Observatory global network of telescopes through the Global Supernova Project. Some of the observations reported herein were obtained at the Bok 2.3 m telescope, a facility of the University of Arizona, at the MMT Observatory, a joint facility of the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution, and at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and NASA; the Keck Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. This work is partly based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the Data Archive at STScI. These observations are associated with programmes GO-9788, GO-13007 and GO-15151. Financial support for programme GO-15151 was provided by NASA through a grant from STScI. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. We thank the support of the staffs at the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is funded by NASA and operated by the California Institute of Technology, as well as IRAF, which is distributed by NOAO (operated by AURA, Inc.), under cooperative agreement with NSF. Numerical computations were in part carried out on the PC cluster at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summits of Maunakea and Haleakala have always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from these mountains. Data availability: The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the Open Supernova Catalog (https://sne.space/) and the Weizmann Interactive Supernova Data Repository (https://wiserep.weizmann.ac.il/), or from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Code availability: MESA is publicly available at http://mesa.sourceforge.net/. Author Contributions: D.H. initiated the study, triggered follow-up observations, reduced the Las Cumbres data, produced the light-curve models, performed the analysis and wrote the manuscript. D.A.H. is the principal investigator of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Supernova Project through which all of the Las Cumbres data were obtained; he also assisted with data interpretation and the manuscript. S.D.V.D. is the principal investigator of the HST programme ‘The Stellar Origins of Supernovae’ (GO-15151) through which the post-explosion HST data were obtained; he also found the progenitor candidate in the pre-explosion HST F814W image, calculated the upper limits in the pre-explosion HST and Spitzer images, and assisted with data interpretation and the manuscript. J.A.G. produced the progenitor and light-curve models and assisted with their interpretation and the manuscript. K.M. assisted with theoretical nebular spectral model interpretation and the manuscript. T.J.M. and N.T. assisted with theoretical SAGB progenitor and ECSN light-curve model interpretations and the manuscript. K.N. assisted with theoretical SAGB progenitor and ECSN explosion model interpretation and the manuscript. G.H. assisted in obtaining the Las Cumbres data, reduced the FLOYDS spectra and contributed comments to the manuscript. I.A., C.M. and J.B. assisted in obtaining the Las Cumbres data; I.A. and C.M. also contributed comments to the manuscript. K.A.B. obtained the Keck LRIS and DEIMOS spectra, reduced the LRIS spectra and contributed comments to the manuscript. S.V. is the principal investigator of the Keck proposals (2018B, project code U009; 2019A, project code U019; 2019B, project code U034) under which the nebular spectra were obtained; he also built the Las Cumbres photometric and spectroscopic reduction pipelines, reduced the Keck DEIMOS spectrum and contributed comments to the manuscript. Y.D. assisted in obtaining the Keck LRIS and DEIMOS spectra. P.J.B. obtained and reduced the Swift UVOT data. J.E.A. obtained and reduced the MMT and Bok spectra. C.B. reduced and analysed the MMT SPOL spectropolarimetry. G.G.W. is the principal investigator of the Supernova Spectropolarimetry (SNSPOL) project. P.S.S. is the principal investigator of the SPOL instrument. G.G.W. and P.S.S. collected the spectropolarimetric data with the SPOL instrument at the MMT Observatory. N.S. is the principal investigator of the MMT and Bok programmes; he also contributed comments to the manuscript. D.J.S. co-leads the University of Arizona team that obtained the MMT and Bok spectra; he also contributed comments to the manuscript. G.S.A. reduced and analysed the archival HST WFC3/IR data (GO-12206) of the host galaxy NGC 2146. C.X. and C.M. analysed and rejected the cosmic rays in the pre-explosion HST F814W image. A.V.F., M.C.B., G.F. and P.L.K. are co-investigators of the HST programme (GO-15151); they also contributed comments to the manuscript (which A.V.F. edited in detail). T.N. monitored the supernova and provided his photometry. K.I. is the discoverer of the supernova; he also monitored the supernova and provided his photometry. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Astronomy thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Group: | Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Subject Keywords: | High-energy astrophysics; Stars; Stellar evolution; Time-domain astronomy; Transient astrophysical phenomena | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Issue or Number: | 9 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41550-021-01384-2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20210202-095214084 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Official Citation: | Hiramatsu, D., Howell, D.A., Van Dyk, S.D. et al. The electron-capture origin of supernova 2018zd. Nat Astron 5, 903–910 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01384-2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Deposited By: | George Porter | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Deposited On: | 04 Feb 2021 16:18 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Last Modified: | 23 Sep 2021 21:57 |
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