SuperNova - IIS breaking news

[PeterM]

As per usual the BOSS team have great pleasure in supplying IIS readers with breaking news.

On the 25th July Stu Parker from New Zealand discovered his 18th Supernova. This is quickly turning into the most exciting and interesting object discovered todate.

Discovered at a faint 18.3r magnitude in NGC6925 (Microscopium) the object is rapidly brightening, glowing at 17.2r in my image from last night.

Greg Bock was away at Leyburn and was able to quickly get the confirmation image, while Colin Drescher (the numbers guy) away at Qld Astrofest was able to supply highly accurate positional and magnitude data. I logged the possible discovery on the new TOCP page and sent the advice to CBAT, we also made contact with our professional astronomer collaborator at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. She advised she would obtain a spectra asap using one of the 6.5m Magellan telescopes she had time on.

Well things are really happening quickly. Put it this way, when Stu gets an email from Dan Green at CBAT noting "Stu, looks like you may have found something exciting" and the 10m SALT telescope in South Africa http://www.salt.ac.za/ and the 6.5m Magellan scopes in Chile http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/Magellan/ are buzzing you know you have achieved something special.

So it looks like there will be some very real science to come from this discovery and of course BOSS will keep you informed as things progress.

In the next day or so the object will be given an official designation but for now you can see the images here under PSN J20342262 -3158236.
http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/snimages/

So again, a huge congratulations to Stu Parker and his wife Lynne who supports him in his dedication. They both run a dairy farm in New Zealand and somehow Stu manages 600 plus images per clear night, then blinks them and still manages to get the cows milked. I can't tell you how many hours this involves but it's lots!

Goes to show that YOU an amateur astronomer can contribute to the science of this great hobby with pretty much standard off the shelf gear, you just got to add time and effort.

PeterM.

[Octane]

That is fantastic news. Congratulations, guys.

Was great to meet you all on the Gold Coast. :)

H

[Poita]

Wow, I was just telling a friend last week that backyard Astronomers are still making new discoveries, and wasn't believed!
Congratulations Stu and Lynne!

[renormalised]

Excellent news and great work, congratulations to all concerned:):)

[jjjnettie]

Congratulation to Stu and all the BOSS team.
Sounds like there may be some intriguing developments, how exciting!

It was great to catch up with most of you at Astrofest. :D

[ngcles]

Hi Peter & All,

Well done to the whole team --congratulations!


Best,

Les D

[astroron]

Well ddone Stu and the BOSS team:D
Look forward to future developments :thumbsup:
Cheers

[lepton3]

And on that page you can see a link to my image of this PSN from 30th July, but I've attached the image here in case you don't like Flikr.:)

98557

I measured it at Mag 17.1, so I think it was still increasing in brightness.

Yes, kudos to Stu Parker and the BOSS guys!

-Ivan

[multiweb]

Good on you guys. Well done. :thumbsup:

[h0ughy]

another great effort - congratulations to all involved

[rogerg]

Excellent stuff, good on you :thumbsup:

[PeterM]

Nice image Ivan!

Seems that reports are of an energetic type IIb Hypernova similar to SN2003bg hence the interest in Stu's object. Some interesting reading here.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1783

http://www.citeulike.org/user/arcavi/article/5432431

PeterM.

[big_dav_2001]

Wow, congrats to Stu and the BOSS team

Davin
:cheers:

[sasup]

fantastic stuff.

[shahgazer]

Inspiring indeed!

[Terry B]

Well done

[xelasnave]

Congratulations.
I have been reading up on Hypernova.
The energy involved is staggering.
How you can do anything after working in a dairy beats me.
alex:):):)

[DavidU]

Congratulations to all involved. That's one big bang !

[Davros]

Fantastic, i love this. This is so cutting edge and the reason behind the passion to keep looking up.

[Ric]

Congratulations Stu and BOSS

You guys are rapidly becoming legends in the supernova search world.

[DavidTrap]

Very impressive work by a coordinated team!

Hope you all get the chance to visit the observatories who are feeding off your discoveries.

DT

[PeterM]

Just announced as SN 2011ei on CBET 2777 more soon.
PeterM.

[Greg Bock]

Well done, and congratulations Stu, I see it's now designated 2011ei.
It was well worth the time to get the confirmation images for you from Leyburn while I was re-building the roof on the observatory.:)

To all the IIS'ers I missed seeing at Queensland Astrofest, sorry about that guys, but the work to re-build the roof took longer than I expected, and in the end, I just ran out of time (and steam) to get up to Astrofest.:(

[gary]

Well done! Great team work in action. :thumbsup:

[venus]

Congratulations that is so SUPER!

[Zubenel]

Just goes to show
what dedication and time can do. Congrats

[CraigS]

Congratulations everyone … on a job well done !

Cheers

[Paul Haese]

Well done guys, congrats on the find.

[PeterM]

Just reading the CBET (Central Bureau Electronic Telegram) now and there are a lot of professional astronomers from various universities around the world listed in there.

Interesting that while the CBET notes this maybe a IIb Hypernova it also notes that a comparison to SN 1987A at early phases cannot be ruled out.

Making more sense now as to why all the interest in this Supernova. No doubt the professionals will be hard at work over the coming days.

PeterM.

[coldspace]

Excellent stuff guys. Keep up the good work. :)

[Park123]

Hi All,
Many thanks for your kind good wishes for the resent discovery of 2011ei.
This BOSS discovery is a very important one and is great that we are all able to help science like this.
As usual all in the group have done their part as well special thanks goes to Greg for his conformation, Peter and Colin without everybody this may not of happened at all. We all have a part to play in the process and this worked perfectly like usual.
When we all spent 100s of hours at the scope we all hope to discover something so this is really special. To discover a possible hypernova is pretty cool.
Thanks again and I have included my first image not real good but when I have time will re process and add colour. BTW- the hypernova shows blue in my RGB colour image.

Stu Parker
New Zealand

BOSS-Backyard Observatory Supernova search

[allan gould]

What is it with BOSS? After Astrofest another Sn. Well done and congratulations to Stu for another

[shane.mcneil]

Cool!

[Greg Bock]

Hi all,
for those of you interested, Stu's discovery is now the subject of the SWIFT satellite which has now had a look at this object, and the results are shown below.

(see here for info about SWIFT - Catching Gamma Ray Bursts on the Fly: http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/)

Swift observations of SN2011ei (PSN J20342262-3158236)
ATel #3528; R. Margutti (Harvard Univ.), P. Brown (U. of Utah), A. M. Soderberg (Harvard Univ.) P. Roming (SwRI)
on 3 Aug 2011; 15:54 UT
Credential Certification: Raffaella Margutti (rmargutti@cfa.harvard.edu)
Subjects: Optical, Ultra-Violet, X-ray, Supernovae

The spectral properties of 2011ei (PSN J20342262-3158236) have been recently demonstrated to show a good match to the energetic type-IIb 'hypernova' 2003bg approximately 7 days before maximum light (Milisavljevic, ATel #3526).

A Swift-ToO was executed to observe the field of 2011ei starting from 2011-08-03T04:47:14 UT. No X-ray source is detected at the optical position of the transient (RA=20:34:22.62 dec=-31:58:23.6) with a 3 sigma upper limit of 4.6d-3 c/s in the 0.3-10 keV energy band (total exposure= 9.6 ks).

The Galactic neutral hydrogen column density in the direction of the event is 4.76d20 1/cm2 (Kalberla et al., 2005). Assuming a spectral photon index ~2, this translates into an absorbed flux of ~2.3d-13 erg/s/cm2. This implies that 2011ei is intrinsically fainter than the recently detected type IIb SN2011dh [in M51] at comparable epoch (Soderberg et al., ArXiv:1107.1876 ).
Contemporary Swift-UVOT observations have been obtained in the 6 optical/UV filters. A source is clearly detected at the transient position in the U, B and V band. Including possible contamination from the host galaxy, we measure the following preliminary magnitudes (UVOT photometric system Breeveld et al. 2011, arXiv:1102.4717): filter MJD Mag err U 5776.81 16.66 0.10 B 5776.81 17.54 0.10 V 5776.82 17.27 0.10

The source is seen faintly in the uvw1 filter but not clearly in the uvm2 or uvw2 filters. Reliable magnitudes/limits in the UV would require subtraction of the underlying galaxy. The magnitudes in the table are not corrected for the Galactic extinction due to the reddening of E(B-V) =0.059 in the direction of the transient. (Schlegel et al. 1998). We thank the Swift team for scheduling these ToO observations.

[lepton3]

Greg,

Thank you for the the updates, and please keep them coming. Very interested in the details of this one.

-Ivan

[Park123]

Hello All,

Just a quick update of the progress of SN2011ei

Nidia Morrell of the, Las Campanas Observatory in Chilie said this morning that you can confidently refer to it as a type IIb event- hypernova- because lines are broad. Also the new spectrum better matches 1993J a few days prior to maximum light. She says that more observations will have to be done but a very interesting object.
Stu

[rogerg]

I second the request to keep the updates coming, it is very interesting to read and watch this unfold.

[CraigS]

'Twould be great if they detected some long duration Gamma Ray bursts as well.
(I hope someone is monitoring this aspect).

Great stuff !

Cheers

[Suzy]

Congratulations to Stu and the Boss team.
Good grief, hypernova?! :scared2:

Fancy that- getting the attention of Swift and so many professionals around the world- what a delirious ride this must be! And I can't tell you how proud & the enjoyment I feel to be able to be part of this ride with you'll, watching it unfold.

So proud of the work you do and thank you so much for keeping us updated.
I'm with Craig, can't wait to see if there's going to be gamma ray data on this. :D

[ChubbyStarstuff]

I'd like to add my belated congratulations to Stu and his supporters... I've had goosebumps for 4 days now with this, and I'm not even involved!!

BTW, I did mention this exciting news and linked professor Brian Cox's FB page back here. I hope that's fine with everyone...

[Park123]

Hey Pete,
Thanks for your comments. I very much enjoy Brian Cox's tv programmes so that is great. I don’t use FB myself but there might be some extra comments which is also great. Today Joseph Brimacombe measured SN2011ei and mag 16.So it has gone from mag 18 to 16 in a very short time nice to see it still on the rise. Here is a link to his image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43846774@N02/6030834392/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/43846774@N02/6030834392/)
Thanks

Stu
:thumbsup:

[astroron]

I had a look for it in the 16" three nights ago,but no joy :(
just a little too faint for me :rolleyes:
Great Work Stu.
Cheers :thumbsup:

[Greg Bock]

HI guys,
imaged SN2011ei last night from home, see attached. This was taken with a bright moon very nearby, so the background is affected by scattered moonlight.

I measure its brightness at 16.8V, using SkyX and CCDSoft. so, Ron, I'm not surprised that you had difficulty seeing it in your 16".
Keep an eye out though, particularly after the bright moon disappears from the sky. It may brighten further.

[astroron]

Thanks Greg,I observed it under a dark sky with reasonable seeing and thought every now and then a brief point of light was visible from the S/N location , But I put it down to averted imagination:rolleyes::lol:
Cheers :thumbsup:

[CometGuy]

Well done guys! Big 20 just around the corner :thumbsup:

[Kevnool]

Congrats team.
Your totals will only keep building with the persistance you all put in.

Cheers Kev.

[PeterM]

Thanks Terry and all,
With Stu's 18, & 5 between Brendan and I, BOSS now have 23 Supernova.
All, bar 1, since 2008.

PeterM.