Supernovae in Extreme Environments
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2012
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS) currently covers 33,000 square degrees of the sky in search of transient astrophysical events. Data provided by the Catalina Sky Survey provides an unequaled baseline against which more than 4000 unique optical transient events have been discovered and openly published in real-time. Of the more than 800 supernovae discovered among these are distinct classes of previously undetected extremely luminous type-Ic and type-IIn supernovae. These events appear to reside predominately in very faint, low-metalicity, star-forming galaxies. Similar to the environments that have been associated with so called hypernova explosions. However, the recent discovery of what was very likely the most luminous and optically energetic supernova ever discovered, CSS100217, within the AGN disk of a bright NLS1 galaxy, demonstrates that extreme supernova can occur in a variety of extreme environments. Here we propose to use Gemini observations to continue our study of the extreme supernova populations discovered by CRTS....