Building spectral templates and reconstructing parameters for core collapse supernovae with CASTOR

TL;DR

CASTOR is a new software that uses machine learning to analyze photometric data of core collapse supernovae, building spectral templates and estimating key parameters rapidly and without extensive spectroscopic data.

Contribution

The paper introduces CASTOR, a novel non-parametric, machine learning-based tool for constructing spectral templates and estimating supernova parameters from photometry alone.

Findings

Successfully built spectral templates using data-driven methods.

Estimated supernova parameters consistent with literature.

Demonstrated effectiveness on SN2015ap data.

Abstract

The future of time-domain optical astronomy relies on the development of techniques and software capable of handling a rising amount of data and gradually complementing, or replacing if necessary, real observations. Next generation surveys, like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), will open the door to the new era of optical astrophysics, creating, at the same time, a deficiency in spectroscopic data necessary to confirm the nature of each event and to fully recover the parametric space. In this framework, we developed Core collApse Supernovae parameTers estimatOR (CASTOR), a novel software for data analysis. CASTOR combines Gaussian Process and other Machine Learning techniques to build time-series templates of synthetic spectra and to estimate parameters of core collapse supernovae for which only multi-band photometry is available. Techniques to build templates are fully data driven and non-parametric through empirical and robust models, and rely on the direct comparison with a training set of 111 core collapse supernovae from the literature. Furthermore, CASTOR employees the real photometric data and the reconstructed synthetic spectra of an event to estimate parameters that belong to the supernova ejecta, to the stellar progenitor and to the event itself, in a rapid and user-friendly framework. In this work we provide a demonstration of how CASTOR works, studying available data from SN2015ap and comparing our results with those available in literature.