Supernova Progenitor Identification with HST in the 2020s

BERSTEN, MELINA C.; VAN DYK, SCHUYLER

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AAS...23344314V/abstract

Congreso; American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233; 2019

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AAS...23344314V/abstract

upernovae (SNe) are among the most influential events in the Universe, affecting galactic chemical evolution, the formation of new stellar generations, and the creation of compact neutron star and black hole stellar remnants. Thermonuclear SNe also have served as excellent cosmological probes, leading to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. One of the primary means of constraining the nature of the SN progenitor star is via direct identification in pre-explosion imaging data of the host galaxy. For the past 20 years we have been taking great advantage of the superior spatial resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to identify and characterize progenitors, comparing new images of SNe obtained with HST to pre-SN HST images available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). We argue here that much discovery space remains to be explored with HST into the 2020s, in order to advance our understanding of SN progenitors. We further contend that a necessary step forward on into the next decade is to acquire UV-to-near-infrared legacy imaging for many potential future SN host galaxies in the Local Volume.