Progenitor, precursor, and evolution of the dusty remnant of the stellar merger M31-LRN-2015

Abstract

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Acknowledgement

NB would like to thank O. Pejcha, M. MacLeod, B. Metzer, O. De Marco and N. Soker for useful discussions, A. Kurtenkov and S. C. Williams for making available the spectra of M31-LRN-2015, A. Pastorello for data on AT2017fjs, T. Kaminski for the spectrum of V1309Sco, M. Fraser, D. Perley, and R. M. Wagner for observations and data reduction, and T. Szalai for the dust emission models. This work is part of the research programme VENI, with project number 016.192.277, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). SK acknowledges the financial support by the Polish National Science Center (NCN) through the OPUS grant 2018/31/B/ST9/00334. PEN acknowledges support from the DOE under grant DE-AC02-05CH11231, Analytical Modeling for Extreme-Scale Computing Environments. CSK is supported by NSF grants AST-1908570 and AST-1814440. This research benefited from interactions with Natasha Ivanova, Brian Metzger, and Lars Bildsten, which were funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF5076. The Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory project is a scientific collaboration among the California Institute of Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the Oskar Klein Center, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. The WHT spectrum was taken under program (2014B/P29). This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which 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. This work is based in part on observations made with the Large Binocular Telescope. The LBT is an international collaboration among institutions in the USA, Italy, and Germany. The LBT Corporation partners are the following: the University of Arizona on behalf of the Arizona university system; Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Italy; LBT Beteiligungsge- sellschaft, Germany, representing the Max Planck Society, the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, and Heidelberg University; and the Ohio State University, the Research Corporation, on behalf of The University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota, and University of Virginia. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We acknowledge Telescope Access Program (TAP) funded by the NAOC, CAS, and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. 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. This research made use of astropy,⁴ a community-developed core python package for astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018).

Data Availability

The photometric data and analysis results underlying this study are available in the paper and its online supplementary material. The spectroscopic data underlying this paper are available in the online repository WiseRep (Yaron & Gal-Yam 2012) at https://wiserep.weizmann.ac.il, and can be accessed with the id ‘iPTF15t’.