The Korean 1592--1593 Record of a Guest Star: An `impostor' of the Cassiopeia A Supernova?

TL;DR

This paper explores the hypothesis that the 1592-1593 guest star near Cassiopeia A was an impostor event, suggesting it was a luminous transient with significant circumstellar dust, explaining the missing supernova record.

Contribution

It proposes the possibility of a supernova impostor for Cas A, estimating its brightness and dust extinction, and discusses the implications for historical observations and circumstellar environment.

Findings

The guest star could have been an impostor with M_V ≈ -14.7 mag.

A dust extinction of ≥ 2.8 mag is consistent with observations.

Asymmetric mass loss explains the visibility of light echoes.

Abstract

The missing historical record of the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova (SN) event implies a large extinction to the SN, possibly greater than the interstellar extinction to the current SN remnant. Here we investigate the possibility that the guest star that appeared near Cas A in 1592--1593 in Korean history books could have been an `impostor' of the Cas A SN, i.e., a luminous transient that appeared to be a SN but did not destroy the progenitor star, with strong mass loss to have provided extra circumstellar extinction. We first review the Korean records and show that a spatial coincidence between the guest star and Cas A cannot be ruled out, as opposed to previous studies. Based on modern astrophysical findings on core-collapse SN, we argue that Cas A could have had an impostor and derive its anticipated properties. It turned out that the Cas A SN impostor must have been bright ($M_V =-14.7 \pm 2.2$ mag) and an amount of dust with visual extinction of $\ge 2.8\pm 2.2 $ mag should have formed in the ejected envelope and/or in a strong wind afterwards. The mass loss needs to have been spherically asymmetric in order to see the light echo from the SN event but not the one from the impostor event.