Bibcode
DOI
Simon, Joshua D.; Gal-Yam, Avishay; Penprase, Bryan E.; Li, Weidong; Quimby, Robert M.; Silverman, Jeffrey M.; Allende Prieto, Carlos; Wheeler, J. Craig; Filippenko, Alexei V.; Martinez, Irene T.; Beeler, Daniel J.; Patat, Ferdinando
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 671, Issue 1, pp. L25-L28.
Advertised on:
12
2007
Journal
Citations
37
Refereed citations
33
Description
Patat et al. recently inferred the existence of circumstellar material
around a normal Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) for the first time, finding
time-variable Na I D absorption lines in the spectrum of SN 2006X. We
present high-resolution spectroscopy of the bright SN Ia 2007af at three
epochs and search for variability in any of the Na D absorption
components. Over the time range from 4 days before to 24 days after
maximum light, we find that the host-galaxy Na D lines appear to be of
interstellar rather than circumstellar origin and do not vary down to
the level of 18 mÅ (column density of 2×1011
cm-2). We limit any circumstellar absorption lines to be
weaker than ~10 mÅ (6×1010 cm-2). For
the case of material distributed in spherically symmetric shells of
radius ~1016 cm surrounding the progenitor system, we place
an upper limit on the shell mass of ~(3×10-8)/X
Msolar, where X is the Na ionization fraction. We also show
that SN 2007af is a photometrically and spectroscopically normal SN Ia.
Assuming that the variable Na D lines in SN 2006X came from
circumstellar matter, we therefore conclude that either there is a
preferred geometry for the detection of variable absorption components
in SNe Ia, or SN 2007af and SN 2006X had different types of progenitor
systems.
Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck
Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the
California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and
NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial
support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.
Based in part on observations obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope,
which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the
Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.