Discovery of a Dusty Yellow Supergiant Progenitor for the Type IIb SN 2017gkk

Abstract

Type IIb supernovae are an important subclass of stripped-envelope supernovae (SNe), which show H lines only at early times. Their progenitors are believed to contain a low-mass H envelope before explosion. This work reports the discovery of a progenitor candidate in preexplosion Hubble Space Telescope images for the Type IIb SN 2017gkk. With detailed analysis of its spectral energy distribution and local environment, we suggest that the progenitor is most likely a yellow supergiant with significant circumstellar extinction and has an initial mass of about 16 M _⊙ , effective temperature log( T _eff /K) = 3.72 ± 0.08, and luminosity log( L / L _⊙ ) = 5.17 ± 0.04. This progenitor is not massive enough to strip envelope through stellar wind, and it supports an interacting binary progenitor channel and adds to the growing list of direct progenitor detections for Type IIb SNe. Future late-time observations will confirm whether this progenitor candidate has disappeared and reveal the putative binary companion that has survived the explosion.

Keywords

• Core-collapse supernovae
• Type II supernovae
• Circumstellar dust