Browsing by Author "Prieto, Jose"

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    Supernovae in Extreme Environments
    (2012) Drake, Andrew J.; Prieto, Jose; Djorgovski, George; Mahabal, Ashish; Beshore, Edward; Graham, Matthew; Catelan, Marcio; Christensen, Eric; Stoll, Rebecca
    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....
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    The Nature of Extreme Supernova Explosions
    (2010) Drake, Andrew; Mahabal, Ashish; Djorgovski, George; Christensen, Eric; Beshore, Edward; Catelan, Marcio; Prieto, Jose
    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....