The Nature of Extreme Supernova Explosions
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Date
2010
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Abstract
Supernovae provide important insight into the lives and deaths of stellar systems as well as being vital cosmological distance standards. This proposal is for spectroscopic follow-up of the extremely luminous events currently being discovered by the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS). Like the large synoptic surveys of the future, the three telescopes CRTS employs to discover optical transients cover tens of thousands of square degrees on the sky each lunation. This coverage has so far enabled the discovery of well over 1200 distinct optical transient events including more than 330 supernovae. Among these supernovae at least a dozen are extremely luminous type IIn and pair- instability supernovae. In this work we hope to significantly increase the understanding of the nature of the supernova progenitors, as well as their host galaxies....