Poster Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

Type Ia Supernova Bolometric Light Curves and Ejected Mass Estimates from the Nearby Supernova Factory (#266)

Richard Scalzo 1 , Greg Aldering 2 , Pierre Antilogus 3 , Cecilia Aragon 2 4 , Stephen Bailey , Charles Baltay 5 , Sebastien Bongard 3 , Clement Buton 6 , Arnaud Canto 3 , Flora Cellier-Holzem 3 , Michael Childress 1 2 7 , Nicolas Chotard 8 , Yannick Copin 8 , Hannah Fakhouri 2 7 , Emmanuel Gangler 8 , Julien Guy 2 , Eric Hsiao , Matthias Kerschhaggl 6 , Marek Kowalski 6 , Markus Kromer 9 , Peter Nugent 10 , Kerstin Paech 6 , Reynald Pain 3 , Emmanuel Pecontal 11 , Rui Pereira 8 , Saul Perlmutter 2 7 , David Rabinowitz 5 , Mickael Rigault 8 , Karl Runge , Claire Saunders , Stuart Sim 1 12 , Gerard Smadja 8 , Charling Tao 13 14 , Stefan Taubenberger 9 , Rollin Thomas 10 , Benjamin Weaver 15 , Chao Wu 3 16
  1. Australian National University, Weston Creek, ACT, Australia
  2. Physics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
  3. LPNHE, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6, Paris, France
  4. Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
  5. Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
  6. Physikalisches Institut, Universitat Bonn, Bonn, Germany
  7. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
  8. IPNL, Universite de Lyon, Lyon, France
  9. Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik, Garching-bei-Munchen, Germany
  10. Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
  11. CRAL, Universite de Lyon, Lyon, France
  12. School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK
  13. Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille, Marseille, France
  14. Tsinghua Center for Astrophysics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
  15. Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  16. National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

We present a sample of normal type Ia supernovae from the Nearby Supernova Factory dataset with spectrophotometry at sufficiently late phases to estimate the ejected mass using the bolometric light curve. We measure 56Ni masses from the peak bolometric luminosity, then compare the luminosity in the 56Co-decay tail to the expected rate of radioactive energy release from ejecta of a given mass. We infer the ejected mass in a Bayesian context using a semi-analytic model of the ejecta, incorporating constraints from contemporary numerical models as priors on the density structure and distribution of 56Ni throughout the ejecta. We find a strong correlation between the ejected mass and the light curve decline rate, and consequently the 56Ni mass, with ejected masses in our data ranging from 0.9–1.4 M⊙. Most fast-declining (SALT2 x1 < −1 or ∆m15,B > 1.2) normal SNe Ia have significantly sub-Chandrasekhar ejected masses in our analysis. At least two progenitor scenarios seem to be necessary to explain our observations.