PI: Lluís Galbany; Advisor: Inma Domínguez
Supernovae are cornerstone to understand the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Universe, cosmology and fundamental physics. In spite of the great advances achieved during the last decades, key questions remain open. We propose to determine the binary fraction of progenitors of core-collapse supernovae (CC- SNe) and resolve the turn-on time of type Ia supernova (SN Ia) progenitor systems through exploiting unique trove of integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) data and by developing a new spectral synthesis model to resolve stellar age distributions from 10–200 Myr. The proposer team has access to the largest set of IFS available from the most current leading surveys: MaNGA, CALIFA, and AMUSING. We will develop a new Bayesian single stellar population fitting method which will include at the same time information of the ionized gas and UV, to help constrain the youngest stellar populations, and NIR to better disentangle the degeneracy between age and reddening by dust. We will use IFS data of around thousand galaxies and the new method to recover the star formation histories at every single observed position including the SN position, and use the method presented in Maoz et al. (2010) to recover the delay-time distribution (DTD) of both CC SN and SNe Ia and measure: (i) the shape of the late CC SN DTD tail, to check whether populations of 50–200 Myr are typically associated to CCSN locations which would prove the binary progenitor scenario; and (ii) the lower turn-on age of the SN Ia DTD, to determine the age of the youngest stars producing SNeIa. Finally, we will test the role of different star formation histories at SN Ia locations affect their precision as cosmological distance tools. This proposal is for an ambitious, competitive, and accomplishable project that will lead to significant advances in our understanding of supernova progenitors and provide a tool for wide-ranging studies of stellar populations in the new era of IFS data.
The primary goals of this project are:
(i) to constrain the shape of the late CC SN DTD tail, and check whether populations of 50–200 Myr are typically associated with CC SN locations proving the binary progenitor scenario, which would be a major breakthrough in the field;
(ii) to determine the lower turn-on age of the type Ia SN DTD, the age of the youngest stars that can produce SNe Ia; and
(iii) to test whether the star formation history (SFH) at SN Ia locations has any implication in its use as cosmological distance indicators, which would potentially help reducing systematic uncertainties in their brightness standardization.
To achieve these objectives we will recover SFHs through single stellar population (SSP) fitting of spatially resolved IFS at SN locations for both CC and SNe Ia, and construct their DTDs.
The PMAS/PPak Integral field Supernova hosts COmpilation (PISCO) is a survey of SN host galaxies using the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory
The All-weather MUse Supernova Integral field Nearby Galaxies (AMUSING) survey uses de MUSE IFU at the 8.1m UT4 Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal Observatory
The HI - KOALA IFS Dwarf galaxy Survey uses the KOALA+AAOmega at the AAT to obtain IFS of neaby galaxies from the Siding Spring Observatory