Description:

Janet Chen, Max Planck Institute

Host: Giacomo Terreran

Giant explosions in dwarf hosts : “GREAT” survey of superluminous supernovae

A new class of supernovae, superluminous supernovae, has been discovered in the past few years. They are 100 times brighter (with absolute mag ~ -21) than normal core-collapse supernovae. This means that the standard paradigm of iron-core collapse cannot account for the origin of superluminous supernovae. An alternative mechanism is needed to power such high luminosities, including magnetar spin down, pair-instability explosions and shell collisions. In this talk, I will present our work from discovery of superluminous supernovae with our "GREAT" (GRond-Epessto-ATlas) survey, which aim is to find superluminous supernovae at very first stage; to classification with the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects (PESSTO), and follow-up campaign with large facilities such as the Very Large Telescope. We found superluminous supernovae appear to occur exclusively in dwarf, metal-poor host galaxies, and a sub-solar metallicity seems required to produce superluminous supernovae. We also found a possible relation that if magnetar powering is the source of the extreme luminosity then the required initial spins appear to be correlated with metallicity of the host galaxy. Finally I will also focus on the diversity of superluminous supernovae and a challenge of metal rich environment has been found for SLSNe.