CaltechAUTHORS
Published April 2018 | Version Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Two peculiar fast transients in a strongly lensed host galaxy

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of South Carolina
  • 2. ROR icon Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  • 3. ROR icon University of California, Davis
  • 4. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 5. ROR icon University of the Basque Country
  • 6. ROR icon Ikerbasque
  • 7. ROR icon University of Ferrara
  • 8. ROR icon University of Groningen
  • 9. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
  • 10. ROR icon Institute of Physics of Cantabria
  • 11. ROR icon University of California, Berkeley
  • 12. ROR icon University of California, Santa Cruz
  • 13. ROR icon New York University
  • 14. ROR icon American Museum of Natural History
  • 15. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 16. ROR icon University of Milan
  • 17. ROR icon University of Copenhagen
  • 18. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 19. ROR icon Durham University
  • 20. ROR icon University of KwaZulu-Natal
  • 21. ROR icon Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
  • 22. ROR icon University of Tokyo
  • 23. ROR icon University of Minnesota
  • 24. ROR icon Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network
  • 25. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 26. ROR icon University of California, Riverside
  • 27. ROR icon Universidade de São Paulo
  • 28. ROR icon Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía
  • 29. ROR icon Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
  • 30. ROR icon Centre for Astronomical Reseach of Lyon
  • 31. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 32. ROR icon Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
  • 33. ROR icon University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
  • 34. ROR icon Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica
  • 35. ROR icon Technical University of Munich
  • 36. ROR icon University of California, Los Angeles
  • 37. ROR icon University of Arizona
  • 38. ROR icon Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Abstract

A massive galaxy cluster can serve as a magnifying glass for distant stellar populations, as strong gravitational lensing magnifies background galaxies and exposes details that are otherwise undetectable. In time-domain astronomy, imaging programmes with a short cadence are able to detect rapidly evolving transients, previously unseen by surveys designed for slowly evolving supernovae. Here, we describe two unusual transient events discovered in a Hubble Space Telescope programme that combined these techniques with high-cadence imaging on a field with a strong-lensing galaxy cluster. These transients were faster and fainter than any supernovae, but substantially more luminous than a classical nova. We find that they can be explained as separate eruptions of a luminous blue variable star or a recurrent nova, or as an unrelated pair of stellar microlensing events. To distinguish between these hypotheses will require clarification of the cluster lens models, along with more high-cadence imaging of the field that could detect related transient episodes. This discovery suggests that the intersection of strong lensing with high-cadence transient surveys may be a fruitful path for future astrophysical transient studies.

Additional Information

© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. The authors thank M. Livio and L. Chomiuk for discussion of this paper, as well as S. Murray and the late N. Gehrels for assistance with the Chandra and Swift data, respectively. Some of the data in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G, and by other grants and contracts. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. Financial support for this work was provided to S.A.R., O.G. and L.-G.S. by NASA through grant HST-GO-13386 from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. G.B.C. and P.R. acknowledge financial support from PRIN-INAF 2014 1.05.01.94.02. J.M.D. acknowledges support of projects AYA2015-64508-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and AYA2012-39475-C02-01 and the consolider project CSD2010-00064 funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad. A.V.F. and P.L.K. are grateful for financial assistance from the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation and NASA/STScI grants GO-14208, GO-14528, GO-14872 and GO-14922; A.V.F. is also grateful to the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (U.C. Berkeley). The work of A.V.F. was conducted in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF grant PHY-1607611. R.J.F. and the UCSC group are supported in part by NSF grant AST-1518052 and from fellowships to R.J.F. from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. C.G. acknowledges support by the VILLUM FONDEN Young Investigator Programme through grant 10123. J.H. was supported by a VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grant (project number 16599). M.J. was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (grant ST/L00075X/1) and used the DiRAC Data Centric system at Durham University, operated by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). M.J. was funded by BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant ST/K00042X/1, STFC capital grant ST/H008519/1, STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K003267/1 and Durham University. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure. R.K. was supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow (16J01302). A.M. acknowledges the financial support of the Brazilian funding agency FAPESP (Postdoc fellowship, process 2014/11806-9). M.O. acknowledges support in part by World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan, and JSPS KAKENHI grants 26800093 and 15H05892. J.R. acknowledges support from the ERC starting grant 336736-CALENDS. G.C. and S.H.S. thank the Max Planck Society for support through the Max Planck Research Group of S.H.S. The GLASS team and T.T. were funded by NASA through NASA/STScI grant GO-13459. L.L.R.W. thanks the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota for providing resources and support. Data availability: The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. All HST data utilized for this work are available through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Author Contributions: S.A.R. designed the observations, processed the HST data, organized the analysis and wrote the manuscript. M.B., T.B., G.B.C., G.C., J.M.D., A.H., M.J., R.K., M.O., J.R., K.S., S.H.S., L.L.R.W. and A.Z. contributed to the lensing analysis with construction and/or interpretation of a cluster lens model. I.B., G.B., G.B.C., C.G., S.H., B.M., A.M., P.R., K.B.S., J.S. and B.J.W. collected, processed and/or analysed data on the host galaxy and other galaxies in the cluster field. R.J.F., S.W.J., P.L.K., C.M., O.G., J.H., A.G.R. and L.-G.S. contributed to the evaluation of models of astrophysical transients. A.V.F. and T.T. assisted with the observational programme design and editing of the manuscript. 1The authors declare no competing interests.

Attached Files

Submitted - 1707.02434

Supplemental Material - 41550_2018_405_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41550_2018_405_MOESM2_ESM.txt

Supplemental Material - 41550_2018_405_MOESM3_ESM.txt

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
86051
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20180425-165415725

Related works

Describes
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02434 (URL)

Funding

NASA
NNX09AF08G
NASA/JPL/Caltech
NASA
HST-GO-13386
NASA
NAS 5-26555
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)
2014 1.05.01.94.02
Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO)
AYA2015-64508-P
Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)
Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO)
CSD2010-00064
Christopher R. Redlich Fund
TABASGO Foundation
NASA
GO-14208
NASA
GO-14528
NASA
GO-14872
NASA
GO-14922
Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science
NSF
PHY-1607611
NSF
AST-1518052
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
VILLUM FONDEN
10123
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
ST/L00075X/1
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
ST/K00042X/1
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
ST/H008519/1
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
ST/K003267/1
Durham University
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
16J01302
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP)
2014/11806-9
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
26800093
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
15H05892
European Research Council (ERC)
336736-CALENDS
Max Planck Society
NASA
GO-13459
Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

Dates

Created
2018-04-26
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-15
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

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Caltech groups
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)