Supernovae
I lead the supernova group at LCOGT and UCSB. Current members include: Stefano Valenti, Iair Arcavi, and Jerod Parrent. Past members: Melissa Graham, Dave Sand, Ben Dilday, and Federica Bianco. Institutionally, we're a part of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), La Silla/ QUEST (LSQ), and Pan-STARRS1 collaborations. I'm a member of the Supernova Legacy Survey and past member of the Supernova Cosmology Project.
Superluminous supernovae![]() We found two supernovae in the Supernova Legacy Survey that are some of the most powerful and ancient known. They are 100 times as powerful as a normal core-collapse supernova, which is hard to understand.
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PTF11kx: a Type Ia Supernova from a Recurrent Nova Progenitor
![]() In a recent Science article, Dilday et al. 2012, we describe our observations of a supernova with several shells of gas around it, that we argue indicates that it is from a recurrent nova. This is the first good evidence of a link between recurrent novae and supernovae. And it shows that there is more than one path to making a Type Ia supernova. Follow-up research shows that a fraction of other supernovae, called Type IIn supernovae appear to be like PTF11kx, but have historically been misclassified.
Dilday et al. 2012, Science [Online] [ArXiv] |