A public UV snapshot survey of core-collapse supernova hosts in IFS dat
Abstract
We propose a public UV survey of core-collapse supernova (CCSN) host galaxies to provide environmental insights into their progenitor systems. Understanding the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), the explosive deaths of massive stars, is vital to our understanding of the chemical and dynamical evolution of the baryonic Universe, and the production channels for compact merger gravitational wave sources. Our knowledge of how progenitor properties (e.g. initial mass, multiplicity, metallicity) translate to the empirical CCSN subclasses is sorely lacking. Despite surges in CCSN discoveries, direct progenitor constraints are elusive, and so environment and host galaxy studies, through analysis of the coeval stellar populations, offer valuable alternate routes to perform large-scale population studies. UV coverage is uniquely afforded by HST and a key window into star formation and massive stellar populations. Crucially, the targets have been selected by having pre-existing integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) observations. Galaxy studies have undergone a resurgance with the advent of new IFS instruments, allowing spatially-resolved spectroscopic studies across entire galaxies, but suffer from a lack of wavelength coverage. The UV data proposed is essential to derive meaningful properties of young stellar populations. This will provide the age resolution in stellar population fitting to, for the first time, directly measure the delay-time-distribution of CCSNe and assess the relative contribution of binary progenitors. Such a data set will have legacy for a multitude of galaxy studies and we are commited to making our joint UV+IFS dataset and analysis public.
- Publication:
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HST Proposal
- Pub Date:
- May 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020hst..prop16287L