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Published December 10, 2023 | Published
Journal Article Open

Probing the Low-mass End of Core-collapse Supernovae Using a Sample of Strongly-stripped Calcium-rich Type IIb Supernovae from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Abstract

The fate of stars in the zero-age main-sequence (ZAMS) range ≈8–12 M_⊙ is unclear. They could evolve to form white dwarfs or explode as electron-capture supernovae (SNe) or iron core-collapse SNe (CCSNe). Even though the initial mass function indicates that this mass range should account for over 40% of all CCSN progenitors, few have been observationally confirmed, likely due to the faintness and rapid evolution of some of these transients. In this paper, we present a sample of nine Ca-rich/O-poor Type IIb SNe detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility with progenitors likely in this mass range. These sources have a [Ca ii] λ λ7291, 7324/[O i] λ λ6300, 6364 flux ratio of ≳2 in their nebular spectra. Comparing the measured [O i] luminosity (≲10³⁹ erg s⁻¹) and derived oxygen mass (≈0.01 M_⊙) with theoretical models, we infer that the progenitor ZAMS mass for these explosions is less than 12 M _⊙. The ejecta properties (M_(ej) ≲ 1 M_⊙ and E_(kin) ∼ 10⁵⁰ erg) are also consistent. The low ejecta mass of these sources indicates a class of strongly-stripped SNe that is a transition between the regular stripped-envelope SNe and ultra-stripped SNe. The progenitor could be stripped by a main-sequence companion and result in the formation of a neutron star−main sequence binary. Such binaries have been suggested to be progenitors of neutron star−white dwarf systems that could merge within a Hubble time and be detectable with LISA.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank Adam Burrows for valuable comments on the manuscript. We thank the anonymous referee for the valuable comments that significantly improved the quality of the paper. 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 grant No. 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, France, the University of Warwick, the University of Bochum, and Northwestern University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

SED Machine is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1106171.

The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant No. 12540303 (PI: Graham).

The GROWTH Marshal was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1545949.

The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT.

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 observations 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.

The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. The ztfquery code was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 759194 − USNAC; PI: Rigault).

S.S. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, project No. 2016-06012.

Data Availability

All the photometric and spectroscopic data used in this work can be found here.

The optical photometry and spectroscopy will also be made public through WISeREP, the Weizmann Interactive Supernova Data Repository (Yaron & Gal-Yam 2012).

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Created:
January 3, 2024
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January 3, 2024