Spectropolarimetry of Type II supernovae (I) Sample, observational data and interstellar polarization

Abstract

We investigate polarization spectra of hydrogen-rich core-collapse supernovae (Type~II SNe). The polarization signal from SNe contains two independent components: intrinsic SN polarization and interstellar polarization (ISP). From these components, we can study the SN explosion geometry and the dust properties in their host galaxies or in the Milky Way. In this first paper, using a new improved method, we investigate the properties of the ISP components of 11 well-observed Type~II SNe. As a result of our analysis, we find that 10 out of these 11 SNe showed a steady ISP component with a polarization degree $\lesssim 1.0$ \%, while one SN was consistent with zero ISP. As for the wavelength dependence, SN~2001dh (and possibly SN~2012aw) showed a non-Milky-Way-like ISP likely originating from the interstellar dust in their respective host galaxies: their polarization maxima were located at short wavelengths ($\lesssim 4000$~Å). Similar results have been obtained previously for highly reddened SNe. The majority of the SNe in our sample had too large uncertainties in the wavelength dependence of their ISP components to consider them further. Our work demonstrates that, by applying this method to a larger SN sample, further investigation of the ISP component of the SN polarization can provide new opportunities to study interstellar dust properties in external galaxies.

35 pages, 36 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Spectropolarimetry of Type II supernovae (II) Intrinsic supernova polarization and its relations with the photometric/spectroscopic properties
• The bright long-lived Type II SN 2021irp powered by aspherical circumstellar material interaction (II): Estimating the CSM mass and geometry with polarimetry and light curve modeling
• Science with a large field-of-view polarization survey: The Large Array Survey Telescope Polarization Node (LAST-P)
• Subluminous Type IIP SN 2024abfl as a Result of a Significantly Low-energy Fe-core Collapse