Supernovae and Gaia

TL;DR

This paper discusses how Gaia's astrometric mission will significantly enhance the discovery and understanding of supernovae, aiding in resolving key questions about their progenitors and explosion mechanisms across various types and redshifts.

Contribution

It highlights Gaia's potential to discover numerous supernovae and improve systematic understanding of their diversity and use as distance indicators.

Findings

Gaia will discover a large number of supernovae.

Next-generation surveys will improve understanding of supernova diversity.

Gaia's data will help assess supernovae as standard candles.

Abstract

Despite decades of dedicated efforts there are still basic questions to answer with regard to Supernova progenitor systems and explosion mechanisms. In particular, in the last years a number of exceptionally bright objects and extremely faint events have demonstrated an unexpected large Supernova variety. The large number of Supernovae candidates at different redshifts provided by the next generation surveys, from ground and space, will allow to reach a better insight of the Supernova events in all their flavours. In particular it will be the possible to assess the systematics of type Ia Supernovae as distance indicator at any redshift. The Gaia astrometric mission is expected to discover a huge number of transient events, including Supernovae, which will be immediately disseminated to the astronomical community by a transients alert system for a suitable follow up.