Bolometric Lightcurves of Peculiar Type II-P Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new Python tool, SuperBoL, for calculating bolometric lightcurves of Type II-P supernovae using multiple methods, improving error estimates and aiding interpretation of diverse supernovae.

Contribution

The paper presents SuperBoL, a Python package that computes bolometric lightcurves with robust error analysis using three established techniques, and validates it against models and previous data.

Findings

SuperBoL produces lightcurves consistent with previous results.

The direct integration method accurately reproduces model spectra luminosity within ~5%.

SuperBoL's error estimates are more robust, with uncertainties between 0.2 and 0.5.

Abstract

We examine the bolometric lightcurves of five Type II-P supernovae (SNe 1998A, 2000cb, 2006V, 2006au and 2009E) which are thought to originate from blue supergiant progenitors using a new python package named SuperBoL. With this code, we calculate SNe lightcurves using three different techniques common in the literature: the quasi-bolometric method, which integrates the observed photometry, the direct integration method, which additionally corrects for unobserved flux in the UV and IR, and the bolometric correction method, which uses correlations between observed colors and V-band bolometric corrections. We present here the lightcurves calculated by SuperBoL along with previously published lightcurves, as well as peak luminosities and Ni-56 yields. We find that the direct integration and bolometric correction lightcurves largely agree with previously published lightcurves, but with what we believe to be more robust error calculations, with $0.2 \leq \delta L_{bol}/L_{bol} \leq 0.5$. Peak luminosities and Ni-56 masses are similarly comparable to previous work. SN 2000cb remains an unusual member of this sub-group, owing to the faster rise and flatter plateau than the other supernovae in the sample. Initial comparisons with the NLTE atmosphere code PHOENIX show that the direct integration technique re-produces the luminosity of a model supernova spectrum to ~5% when given synthetic photometry of the spectrum as input. Our code is publicly available. The ability to produce bolometric lightcurves from observed sets of broad-band light curves should be helpful in the interpretation of other types of supernovae, particularly those that are not well characterized, such as extremely luminous supernovae and faint fast objects.