THE EXTREME HOSTS OF EXTREME SUPERNOVAE
- California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
- University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH (United Kingdom)
- Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Faculty of Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100 Rehovot (Israel)
- Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, 6740 Cortona Dr., Suite 102, Goleta, CA 93117 (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS 50F-1650, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720-8139 (United States)
- The Observatories of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, CA 91101 (United States)
- Max-Planck-Institut fuer Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, D-85748 Garching (Germany)
- Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 (United States)
- Center for Astrophysical Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
- Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, BP 8, Traverse du Siphon, 13376 Marseille Cedex 12 (France)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
We use GALEX ultraviolet (UV) and optical integrated photometry of the hosts of 17 luminous supernovae (LSNe, having peak M{sub V} < -21) and compare them to a sample of 26, 000 galaxies from a cross-match between the SDSS DR4 spectral catalog and GALEX interim release 1.1. We place the LSN hosts on the galaxy NUV - r versus M{sub r} color-magnitude diagram (CMD) with the larger sample to illustrate how extreme they are. The LSN hosts appear to favor low-density regions of the galaxy CMD falling on the blue edge of the blue cloud toward the low-luminosity end. From the UV-optical photometry, we estimate the star formation history of the LSN hosts. The hosts have moderately low star formation rates (SFRs) and low stellar masses (M{sub *}) resulting in high specific star formation rates (sSFR). Compared with the larger sample, the LSN hosts occupy low-density regions of a diagram plotting sSFR versus M{sub *} in the area having higher sSFR and lower M{sub *}. This preference for low M{sub *}, high sSFR hosts implies that the LSNe are produced by an effect having to do with their local environment. The correlation of mass with metallicity suggests that perhaps wind-driven mass loss is the factor that prevents LSNe from arising in higher-mass, higher-metallicity hosts. The massive progenitors of the LSNe (>100 M{sub sun}), by appearing in low-SFR hosts, are potential tests for theories of the initial mass function that limit the maximum mass of a star based on the SFR.
- OSTI ID:
- 21567625
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 727, Issue 1; Other Information: DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/727/1/15; ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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