Eruptive mass loss less than a year before the explosion of superluminous supernovae. I. The cases of SN 2020xga and SN 2022xgc

Abstract

Copyright and License

© The Authors 2025. Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum, Northwestern University and former partners the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1106171. The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham). The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through both the Data-Driven Investigator Program and a dedicated grant, provided critical funding for SkyPortal. Based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, Chile, as part of ePESSTO+ (the advanced Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects Survey). ePESSTO+ observations were obtained under ESO programs ID 106.216C and 108.220C. Some of the observations with the Las Cumbres Observatory data have been obtained via OPTICON proposals and as part of the Global Supernova Project. The OPTICON project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730890. This work has made use of data from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project. ATLAS is primarily funded to search for near earth asteroids through NASA grants NN12AR55G, 80NSSC18K0284, and 80NSSC18K1575; byproducts of the NEO search include images and catalogs from the survey area. The ATLAS science products have been made possible through the contributions of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the South African Astronomical Observatory. Partially based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. Based on observa- tions made with the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) operated on the island of La Palma by the Fundación Galileo Galilei of the INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

RL is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 10104229 - TransPIre). FP acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MICINN) under grant numbers PID2022-141915NB-C21. SS is partially supported by LBNL Subcontract 7707915. NS and AS are supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation through the “Gravity Meets Light” project. RKT is supported by the NKFIH/OTKA FK-134432 and the NKFIH/OTKA K-142534 grant of the National Research, Development and Innovation (NRDI) Office of Hungary. MN is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 948381) and by UK Space Agency Grant No. ST/Y000692/1. JPA is supported by ANID, Millennium Science Initiative, ICN12_009. T.E.M.B. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCIN), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) 10.13039/501100011033, and the European Union Next Generation EU/PRTR funds under the 2021 Juan de la Cierva program FJC2021-047124-I and the PID2020-115253GA-I00 HOSTFLOWS project, from Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) under the PIE project 20215AT016, and the program Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M. MB and TP acknowledge the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (grants I0-0033, P1-0031, J1-8136, J1-2460 and Z1-1853) and the Young Researchers program. MK acknowledges financial support from MICINN (Spain) through the programme Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación [JC2022-049447-I] and from AGAUR, CSIC, MCIN and AEI 10.13039/501100011033 under projects PID2023-151307NB-I00, PIE 20215AT016, CEX2020-001058-M, and 2021-SGR-01270. CPG acknowledges financial support from the Secretary of Universities and Research (Government of Catalonia) and by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme of the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie and the Beatriu de Pinós 2021 BP 00168 programme, from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCIN) and the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) 10.13039/501100011033 under the PID2020-115253GA-I00 HOSTFLOWS project, and the program Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M. L.G. acknowledges financial support from AGAUR, CSIC, MCIN and AEI 10.13039/501100011033 under projects PID2023-151307NB-I00, PIE 20215AT016, CEX2020-001058-M, and 2021-SGR-01270. T.-W.C. acknowledges the Yushan Fellow Program by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan for the financial support (MOE-111-YSFMS-0008-001-P1). MF is supported by a Royal Society - Science Foundation Ireland University Research Fellowship. This work makes use of data from the Las Cumbres Observatory global network of telescopes. The LCO group is supported by NSF grants AST-1911151 and AST-1911225. IPF acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigació n del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovació n (AEI-MCINN) under grant PID2022-137779OB-C44. AS acknowledges the Warwick Astrophysics PhD prize scholarship made possible thanks to a generous philanthropic donation.

Data Availability

The photometric data for SN 2020xga and SN 2022xgc are available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr (130.79.128.5) or via https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/694/A292. All spectra of SN 2020xga and SN 2022xgc have been uploaded to the WISeREP¹⁵ archive (Yaron & Gal-Yam 2012). The corner plots of SN 2020xga and SN 2022xgc resulting from the REDBACK modeling are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14565605.