Supernova 2020wnt: An Atypical Superluminous Supernova with a Hidden Central Engine

Abstract

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 Norbert Langer, Matt Nicholl, Conor Omand, Dan Kasen, David Khatami, Anders Jerkstrand, and Heloise Stevance for helpful discussions. We also thank the organizers of the IAU360 Massive Stars Near and Far symposium, where a lot of helpful discussions about this object were made. We thank Robert Quimby for providing data points used to make Figure 6. We thank Matt Nicholl for providing the mean SLSN and SN Ic spectra for Figure 7. S.S. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, under project number 2016-06012. A.G. acknowledges support from the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Spring 2022. A.G. is also supported by the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. DGE1746047, and the Center for Astrophysical Surveys Graduate Fellowship at the University of Illinois. 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. NIRES data presented in this paper were supported in part by NASA Keck PI Data Awards 2020B_N141 and 2021A_N147 (PI: Jha), administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. Parts of this work are based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a program of the NSF's NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). This work uses data from the Infrared Telescope Facility, which is operated by the University of Hawaii under contract 80HQTR19D0030 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 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. Parts of this work are 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 Nos. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners 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. The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant No. 12540303 (PI: Graham). Parts of this work are 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.

Software References

YSE-PZ (Coulter et al. 2022), CASA (McMullin et al. 2007), spextool (Cushing et al. 2004), xtellcor (Vacca et al. 2003), IRAF (Tody 1986, 1993), george (Ambikasaran et al. 2015), LE PHARE package (Arnouts et al. 1999; Ilbert et al. 2006), PyNeb (v1.1.16; Luridiana et al. 2015), KEPLER (Weaver et al. 1978; Woosley et al. 2002; Woosley 2017), Firefly (Wilkinson et al. 2017).