Understanding the extreme luminosity of DES14X2fna
astro-ph.HE
/ Authors
M. Grayling, C. P. Gutiérrez, M. Sullivan, P. Wiseman, M. Vincenzi, S. González-Gaitán, B. E. Tucker, L. Galbany, L. Kelsey, C. Lidman
and 59 more authors
E. Swann, D. Carollo, K. Glazebrook, G. F. Lewis, A. Möller, S. R. Hinton, M. Smith, S. A. Uddin, T. M. C. Abbott, M. Aguena, S. Avila, E. Bertin, S. Bhargava, D. Brooks, A. Carnero Rosell, M. Carrasco Kind, J. Carretero, M. Costanzi, L. N. da Costa, J. De Vicente, S. Desai, H. T. Diehl, P. Doel, S. Everett
/ Abstract
We present DES14X2fna, a high-luminosity, fast-declining type IIb supernova (SN IIb) at redshift $z=0.0453$, detected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES). DES14X2fna is an unusual member of its class, with a light curve showing a broad, luminous peak reaching $M_r\simeq-19.3$ mag 20 days after explosion. This object does not show a linear decline tail in the light curve until $\simeq$60 days after explosion, after which it declines very rapidly (4.38$\pm$0.10 mag 100 d$^{-1}$ in $r$-band). By fitting semi-analytic models to the photometry of DES14X2fna, we find that its light curve cannot be explained by a standard $^{56}$Ni decay model as this is unable to fit the peak and fast tail decline observed. Inclusion of either interaction with surrounding circumstellar material or a rapidly-rotating neutron star (magnetar) significantly increases the quality of the model fit. We also investigate the possibility for an object similar to DES14X2fna to act as a contaminant in photometric samples of SNe Ia for cosmology, finding that a similar simulated object is misclassified by a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based photometric classifier as a SN Ia in $\sim$1.1-2.4 per cent of cases in DES, depending on the probability threshold used for a positive classification.