Colloq Abstract - Corsi
September 16
11am Mountain
Alessandra Corsi
VLA follow-up of cosmic explosions and collisions
Abstract
Stripped-envelope core-collapse supernovae with broad lines (BL-Ic SNe) are a rare form of massive stellar deaths that provide us with a special window into the rarer-still engine-driven explosions known as long duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The link between BL-Ic SNe and GRBs was first established with GRB980425 and the radio-bright SN 1998bw. However, for more than a decade after this first discovery, the fraction of BL-Ic SNe harboring GRBs was left largely unconstrained due to the very small number of purely BL-Ic events with radio follow-up available to the community. In this talk, I will describe our systematic follow-up program of BL-Ic SNe with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), enabled by the much-increased rate of BL-Ic discoveries provided by the Palomar Transient Factory. In 5 years, we have doubled the sample of BL-Ic SNe with radio follow-up collected by the community over the previous decade, and set the first observational upper-limit on the fraction of 1998bw-like explosions. I will also describe how the experience gained by studying radio bright SNe has helped us optimize VLA follow-up strategies of gravitational wave (GW) triggers during the first observing run of Advanced LIGO. I will conclude by discussing the impact of our results on future searches for radio counterparts to GWs from binary neutron star collisions.
