Limits On The Brightness Of A Compact Object In The Remnant Of SN 1987a

Details Limits On The Brightness Of A Compact Object In The Remnant Of SN 1987a Limits On The Brightness Of A Compact Object In The Remnant Of SN 1987a

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21923913p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #239.13

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

I have been doing work on Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A) in an attempt to set a limit on the presence of a stellar remnant - specifically, a neutron star - amidst the supernova debris. The observations used were taken by the SAINTS group in 2009 and 2011 with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and they span several wavebands from the ultraviolet to the infrared. To begin establishing the limit, we posed the following question: what is the maximum brightness that an object in the supernova remnant could have while still remaining hidden by the debris?
The first step was to remove as much excess light from the image as possible. This light came primarily from diffraction from the "hotspots” on the circumstellar ring and the nearby stars. By modeling the ring as a series of point spread functions (PSFs), we were able to subtract out much of the pollutant light from the image. The diffraction from the surrounding stars was also removed via PSF subtraction.
The next step was to determine the value of the limit. This was done using a piece of code that inserted a PSF with unknown position and brightness into an image of the remnant. This was done repeatedly for each filter, and for each new image the code recorded whether the user had detected the PSF within the image. After many iterations of this code, a "gray area” was established for each filter, where an inserted PSF of a given brightness was sometimes detected and sometimes not. This gray area was averaged over, and we called this our limit.
The upper limit on the optical luminosity of a compact object within the remnant of SN 1987A came out to be Lopt ≤ 1.6 × 1033 erg/s (0.42 LSun).

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