Title: Bumpy Declining Light Curves are Common in Hydrogen-poor Superluminous Supernovae
Authors: Griffin Hosseinzadeh, Edo Berger, Brian D. Metzger, Sebastian Gomez, Matt Nicholl, and Peter Blanchard
First Author’s Institution: Steward Observatory, University of Arizona
Status: Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal [Open Access]
Space is constantly alight with supernovae— so much so that astronomers are scrambling to keep up! As a result, interest and competitive resources can fall off after a supernova has been named and identified, making it difficult to observe superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) months after the dazzling heights of their light curves.
Brighter than a typical supernova, SLSNe reach blinding absolute magnitudes of m=-20 mag or more. Miraculously, their super-powered light curves last hundreds of days before decreasing to their known slope called a ” radioactive tail.”
Hosseinzadeh et al. argue that this period of time after the initial explosion is well worth the study, because some SLSNe don’t cool off without a fight. Instead, they display unanticipated bumps and wiggles months after the peaks of their light curves. Shared qualities amongst SLSNe that show wiggles could even shed light on the mechanisms powering these behemoths.
What’s Haunting the Cosmic Graveyard?
The source behind monstrous SLSN explosions is a topic of hot debate, especially when it comes to the subclass “Type I,” or explosions devoid of hydrogen in their spectra. There are two main competing theories. The first is that there must be a super-powered neutron star called a magnetar at the center. With the most extreme magnetic fields in the universe, reaching a magnetic field strength of B=1015G, these colossal corpses would serve as a “central engine” driving the explosion’s brightness and prolonging its light curve.
You can tell that something’s not quite right with a magnetar if its cooling phase, or the decrease of its light curve, doesn’t follow a smooth, well-behaved luminosity trend of L ∝ t-2. Observed late-time bumps in SLSNe certainly disrupt this picture, as in Figure 1. To explain bumpy behavior with just a central engine, one would require that material falls back onto the magnetar surface and alights in a violent flare.
Others posit that the hydrogen-poor subclass of SLSNe, “SLSN-I” once were a living star with hydrogen on its surface, but dropped it like a pair of lost glasses. Surely it must be around here somewhere… crunch. The unaware explosion tramples over its circumstellar material (or CSM) as it expands. This interaction would serve as multiple powder kegs prolonging the light curve in a manner similar to the magnetar model. Yet, when astronomers take spectra during SLSN-I bumps, they do not find the smoking-gun evidence of narrow emission lines that would indicate interaction with hydrogen-rich material.
That Ghost Has Footprints!
Hosseinzadeh et al. collected a total of 34 SLSNe-I with plenty of optical data well after their peaks. Of these 34, they find that 44-76% exhibit bumps at about 50 days or more past explosion. Why the broad uncertainty range? Because, unfortunately, the consistency of data coverage limits how sure they can be that these bumps exist. Among their sample, they investigate the questions, “What do these bumps have in common? Are there relationships between overall light curve and the bumps?”
The authors reason that there are five main characteristics of a magnetar: magnetic field (B), spin period (P), ejecta mass (Mej), ejecta velocity (vej ), and the time it takes for the explosion to reach its peak brightness (trise); and there are four main characteristics of a bump: duration (Δt), the time the bump occurs (tbump), the temperature at which it is emitting (Tbump), and amplitude. They cross-compare each of these characteristics by mixing and matching their axes and plotting all 34 SLSNe in Figure 2. Then, they check for correlation, or a clear and obvious trend, between the two quantities on each axes.
They find a “mild correlation” between how quickly the main peak rises and the time at which the bump appears (Figure 2, panel with red text). This correlation could indicate the ejecta reaches a temperature in the range of 6,000-8,000 K— which includes the temperature at which ionized oxygen recombines… suspiciously the same element that dominates SLSN ejecta mass! Could this mean that these bumps are indeed caused by recombination of ionized oxygen, since there’s so much of it? If this occurs at the site of the magnetar, it would ultimately favor the magnetar accretion model.
If the bumps are instead caused by CSM interaction, the authors determine it would be an optically thin shell, on average about 0.034 solar masses with a thickness of about 8.1 x 1015cm. That’s not a whole lot of material, spread about a whole lot of space!
The authors also debate explosion mechanisms using the timing of the wiggles and inner ejecta thickness (not to be confused with the farther-out CSM material). If bumps are caused by changes at the very center of the explosion, such as in an accreting magnetar, then those photons must climb their way out of dense material to reach us. This would require a minimum amount of time that depends on the number of photon collisions, or the opacity of the material. A comparison of these depths and bump times is illustrated in Figure 3: the shaded region indicates where observed bumps appear too quickly to be explained by a photon originating in the center of the explosion. In the unshaded region, the photon could have equally come from the central engine or CSM interaction.
What remains unanswered, however, is whether or not all 34 supernovae must be explained by the same mechanism. If your answer is “yes,” then those meddling supernovae in the shaded region rule out a central engine entirely! If your answer is “no,” then it seems that since most bumps exist in the unshaded region, one could argue that there is diversity among the SLSNe mechanisms; and perhaps those powered without central engines are simply more rare.
Astrobite edited by Lina Kimmig and Briley Lewis
Featured image credit: iStock Photo and Screen Rant
