A Snapshot Survey of Nearby Supernovae with the Hubble Space Telescope

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.12185
• Publication Date: 2024-01-01
• Authors: Raphael Baer-Way; Asia deGraw; WeiKang Zheng; Schuyler D. Van Dyk; A. V. Filippenko; Ori D. Fox; Thomas G. Brink; Patrick L. Kelly; Nathan Smith; Sergiy S. Vasylyev; Thomas de Jaeger; Keto Zhang; Samantha Stegman; Timothy W. Ross; Sameen Yunus
• Keywords: Snapshot (computer storage)

Over recent decades, robotic (or highly automated) searches for supernovae (SNe) have discovered several thousand events, many of them in quite nearby galaxies (distances < 30 Mpc). Most these SNe, including some the best-studied events to date, were found before maximum brightness and associated with extensive follow-up photometry spectroscopy. Some discoveries are so-called SN impostors, thought be superoutbursts luminous blue variable stars, although possibly a new, weak class massive-star explosions. We conducted Snapshot program Hubble Space Telescope(HST) obtained images sites 31 SNe four acquire late-time through two filters. The primary aim this project was reveal origin any lingering energy each event, whether it is result radioactive decay or, cases, ongoing interaction shock pre-existing circumstellar matter, or presence light echo. Alternatively, faint at position may arise from an underlying stellar population (e.g., host star cluster, companion star, chance alignment). results study complement extend those programs by various investigators previous HST cycles.