The destruction and survival of dust in the shell around SN 2008S

TL;DR

This study models the dust environment around SN 2008S before and after explosion, revealing how the supernova vaporized part of the dust shell and estimating the dust destruction and contribution to the interstellar medium.

Contribution

It provides detailed radiative transfer models of the dust shell evolution around SN 2008S, highlighting the minimal dust destruction and estimating dust mass-loss rates.

Findings

The dust shell's inner radius expanded from 85 AU to 1250 AU after the outburst.

Less than 2% of the circumstellar dust was destroyed by the supernova.

The progenitor's dust mass-loss rate was estimated at (0.5-1.0)x10^-4 Msun yr^-1.

Abstract

SN 2008S erupted in early 2008 in the grand design spiral galaxy NGC 6946. The progenitor was detected by Prieto et al. in Spitzer Space Telescope images taken over the four years prior to the explosion, but was not detected in deep optical images, from which they inferred a self-obscured object with a mass of about 10 Msun. We obtained Spitzer observations of SN 2008S five days after its discovery, as well as coordinated Gemini and Spitzer optical and infrared observations six months after its outburst. We have constructed radiative transfer dust models for the object before and after the outburst, using the same r^-2 density distribution of pre-existing amorphous carbon grains for all epochs and taking light-travel time effects into account for the early post-outburst epoch. We rule out silicate grains as a significant component of the dust around SN 2008S. The inner radius of the dust shell moved outwards from its pre-outburst value of 85 AU to a post-outburst value of 1250 AU, attributable to grain vaporisation by the light flash from SN 2008S. Although this caused the circumstellar extinction to decrease from Av = 15 before the outburst to 0.8 after the outburst, we estimate that less than 2% of the overall circumstellar dust mass was destroyed. The total mass-loss rate from the progenitor star is estimated to have been (0.5-1.0)x10^-4 Msun yr^-1. The derived dust mass-loss rate of 5x10^-7 Msun yr^-1 implies a total dust injection into the ISM of up to 0.01 Msun over the suggested duration of the self-obscured phase. We consider the potential contribution of objects like SN 2008S to the dust enrichment of galaxies.