paper

A solar-type star polluted by calcium-rich supernova ejecta inside the supernova remnant RCW 86

arXiv:1702.00936 · doi:10.1038/s41550-017-0116

Abstract

When a massive star in a binary system explodes as a supernova its companion star may be polluted with heavy elements from the supernova ejecta. Such a pollution had been detected in a handful of post-supernova binaries (Gonzalez Hernandez et al. 2011), but none of them is associated with a supernova remnant. We report the discovery of a solar-type star in a close, eccentric binary system with a neutron star within the young Galactic supernova remnant RCW 86. Our discovery implies that the supernova progenitor was a moving star, which exploded near the edge of its wind bubble and lost most of its initial mass due to common-envelope evolution shortly before core collapse. We find that the solar-type star is strongly polluted with calcium and other elements, which places the explosion within the class of calcium-rich supernovae -- faint and fast transients (Filippenko et al. 2003; Kasliwal et al. 2012}, whose origin is strongly debated (Kawabata et al. 2010; Waldman et al. 2011), and provides the first observational evidence that supernovae of this type can arise from core-collapse explosions (Kawabata et al. 2010; Moriya et al. 2010).

24 pages, 5 figures, original version of the manuscript submitted to Nature Astronomy (the accepted version differs from the original one; it will appear in arXiv only in October 2017 because of the journal publication policy)

References in corpus (9)

Cited by in corpus (19)