Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 907, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abd032
Keywords
Eruptive phenomena; Stellar mass loss; Circumstellar matter; Late stellar evolution; Stellar flares; Core-collapse supernovae
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [AST-1440341]
- Caltech
- IPAC
- Weizmann Institute for Science
- Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University
- University of Maryland
- University of Washington
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
- Humboldt University
- Los Alamos National Laboratories
- TANGO Consortium of Taiwan
- University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- NSF [1106171]
- GROWTH project - NSF under PIRE [1545949]
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- UK Science and Technology Facilities Council
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [759194-USNAC]
- Israel Science Foundation
- Minerva
- Israeli Ministry of Technology and Science
- US-Israel Binational Science Foundation
- Weizmann-UK
- Weizmann-Yale
- Weizmann-Caltech grant
- EU via ERC [725161]
- ISF GW excellence center
- IMOS
- BSF/Transformative grant
- GIF grant
- Benoziyo Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Science
- Deloro Institute for Advanced Research in Space and Optics
- Veronika A. Rabl Physics Discretionary Fund
- Paul and Tina Gardner, Yeda-Sela and the WIS-CIT joint research grant
- Helen and Martin Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation
- ISF [1770/19]
- Christopher R. Redlich Fund
- TABASGO Foundation
- Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science
- MIUR (PRIN 2017) [20179ZF5KS]
- Marie Skodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship within the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) Framework Programme for Research and Innovation [H2020-MSCA-IF-2017-794467]
- DiRAC Institute in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington
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Observations have revealed precursor eruptions before supernova explosions, which become brighter and more frequent in the months leading up to the explosion. Despite potentially ejecting large amounts of material, supernovae with detected precursors are not significantly more luminous than other supernovae.
Interaction-powered supernovae (SNe) explode within an optically thick circumstellar medium (CSM) that could be ejected during eruptive events. To identify and characterize such pre-explosion outbursts, we produce forced-photometry light curves for 196 interacting SNe, mostly of Type IIn, detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility between early 2018 and 2020 June. Extensive tests demonstrate that we only expect a few false detections among the 70,000 analyzed pre-explosion images after applying quality cuts and bias corrections. We detect precursor eruptions prior to 18 Type IIn SNe and prior to the Type Ibn SN 2019uo. Precursors become brighter and more frequent in the last months before the SN and month-long outbursts brighter than magnitude -13 occur prior to 25% (5-69%, 95% confidence range) of all Type IIn SNe within the final three months before the explosion. With radiative energies of up to 10(49) erg, precursors could eject similar to 1 M of material. Nevertheless, SNe with detected precursors are not significantly more luminous than other SNe IIn, and the characteristic narrow hydrogen lines in their spectra typically originate from earlier, undetected mass-loss events. The long precursor durations require ongoing energy injection, and they could, for example, be powered by interaction or by a continuum-driven wind. Instabilities during the neon- and oxygen-burning phases are predicted to launch precursors in the final years to months before the explosion; however, the brightest precursor is 100 times more energetic than anticipated.
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