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Exclusion of a luminous red giant as a companion star to the progenitor of supernova SN 2011fe

Nature volume 480, pages 348–350 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Type Ia supernovae are thought to result from a thermonuclear explosion of an accreting white dwarf in a binary system1,2, but little is known of the precise nature of the companion star and the physical properties of the progenitor system. There are two classes of models1,3: double-degenerate (involving two white dwarfs in a close binary system2,4) and single-degenerate models5,6. In the latter, the primary white dwarf accretes material from a secondary companion until conditions are such that carbon ignites, at a mass of 1.38 times the mass of the Sun. The type Ia supernova SN 2011fe was recently detected in a nearby galaxy7. Here we report an analysis of archival images of the location of SN 2011fe. The luminosity of the progenitor system (especially the companion star) is 10–100 times fainter than previous limits on other type Ia supernova progenitor systems8,9,10, allowing us to rule out luminous red giants and almost all helium stars as the mass-donating companion to the exploding white dwarf.

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Figure 1: The site of SN 2011fe in galaxy M101 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Figure 2: Progenitor system constraints in a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Maoz and S. Starrfield for comments, and the staff of the W. M. Keck Observatory, especially J. Lyke and R. Campbell, for their assistance in obtaining the NIRC adaptive optics imaging. P.P. acknowledges discussions on symbiotic binaries with J. Mikolajewska. M.M.K. acknowledges support by NASA’s Hubble Fellowship and the Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship. J.S.B.’s group was partially supported by NASA. J.S.B., A.V.F., L.B. and S.W.J. acknowledge support from the US National Science Foundation. A.V.F.’s group at UC Berkeley, and the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) and its ongoing operation, have received financial assistance from NASA, Gary and Cynthia Bengier, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation, and the TABASGO Foundation. E.O.O. is supported by an Einstein Fellowship from NASA. M.M.S. and J.B. acknowledge the support of Hilary Lipsitz and the American Museum of Natural History for essential funding. M.S. acknowledges support from the Royal Society. Some of the data presented here 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 NASA; the observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Observations were obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Palomar Transient Factory project, a scientific collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, La Cumbres Observatory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the University of Oxford, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, provided staff, computational resources, and data storage for this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-3411, California, USA

    Weidong Li, Joshua S. Bloom, Adam A. Miller, S. Bradley Cenko, Peter E. Nugent, Joseph W. Richards, Alexei V. Filippenko, Mohan Ganeshalingam, Jeffrey M. Silverman & Ken J. Shen

  2. Department of Physics (Astrophysics), University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK,

    Philipp Podsiadlowski, Mark Sullivan & Kate Maguire

  3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, 08854, New Jersey, USA

    Saurabh W. Jha, Curtis McCully & Brandon Patel

  4. Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Goleta, 93117, California, USA

    D. Andrew Howell

  5. Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA

    D. Andrew Howell & Lars Bildsten

  6. Computational Cosmology Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA,

    Peter E. Nugent

  7. Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, 85287-1504, Arizona, USA

    Nathaniel R. Butler

  8. Cahill Center for Astrophysics 249-17, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Eran O. Ofek & S. R. Kulkarni

  9. Benoziyo Center for Astrophysics, Faculty of Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100 Rehovot, Israel,

    Eran O. Ofek

  10. Carnegie Institution for Science, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, 91101, California, USA

    Mansi M. Kasliwal

  11. Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-7450, California, USA

    Joseph W. Richards

  12. Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 96822, Hawaii, USA

    Alan Stockton & Hsin-Yi Shih

  13. Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA

    Lars Bildsten

  14. Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, New York, New York 10024-5192, USA,

    Michael M. Shara & Joanne Bibby

  15. Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 50 St George Street, Toronto M5S 3H4, Ontario, Canada,

    Nicholas M. Law

  16. School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel,

    Dovi Poznanski

  17. IPMU, University of Tokyo, Kashiwanoha 5-1-5, Kashiwa-shi, Chiba, Japan,

    Robert M. Quimby

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  1. Weidong Li
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Contributions

W.L., J.S.B., S.W.J., C.M. and B.P. analysed the Hubble Space Telescope photometry in the context of progenitor limits. P.P. contributed the analysis of progenitor models. A.A.M., J.W.R. and S.B.C. analysed historical imaging from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and KAIT in the context of nova limits. M.M.K. and K.J.S. provided the analysis of Spitzer observations. M.M.S. and J.B. provided analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope imaging. M.M.S. also contributed interpretation of the progenitor limits. N.R.B., E.O.O. and L.B. contributed analysis and interpretation of the historical X-ray imaging. D.P., R.M.Q., S.R.K., N.M.L., E.O.O., S.B.C., M.S., D.A.H., J.S.B., P.E.N., M.M.K., L.B. and K.M. were responsible for obtaining, reducing, and analysing the PTF observations. A.S. and H.-Y.S. obtained the Keck adaptive optics imaging and S.B.C. reduced and analysed those images. A.V.F., M.G., W.L. and J.M.S. were responsible for the KAIT imaging and analysis.

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Correspondence to Weidong Li.

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Li, W., Bloom, J., Podsiadlowski, P. et al. Exclusion of a luminous red giant as a companion star to the progenitor of supernova SN 2011fe. Nature 480, 348–350 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10646

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