2 research outputs found
A search for transients in the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS): Three new supernovae
The Reionization Cluster Survey (RELICS) imaged 41 galaxy clusters with the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in order to detect lensed and high-redshift
galaxies. Each cluster was imaged to about 26.5 AB mag in three optical and
four near-infrared bands, taken in two distinct visits separated by varying
time intervals. We make use of the multiple near-infrared epochs to search for
transient sources in the cluster fields, with the primary motivation of
building statistics for bright caustic crossing events in gravitational arcs.
Over the whole sample, we do not find any significant ()
caustic crossing events, in line with expectations from semi-analytic
calculations but in contrast to what may be naively expected from previous
detections of some bright events, or from deeper transient surveys that do find
high rates of such events. Nevertheless, we find six prominent supernova (SN)
candidates over the 41 fields: three of them were previously reported and three
are new ones reported here for the first time. Out of the six candidates, four
are likely core-collapse (CC) SNe -- three in cluster galaxies, and among which
only one was known before, and one slightly behind the cluster at
. The other two are likely Ia -- both of them previously known,
one probably in a cluster galaxy, and one behind it at . Our study
supplies empirical bounds for the rate of caustic crossing events in galaxy
cluster fields to typical HST magnitudes, and lays the groundwork for a future
SN rate study.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 10 pages, 3 figure