Friday, September 19, 2014

Predicting UV brightness

Here are some plots that may help predict the ultraviolet brightness of a supernova.   They are based on the sample and figures from the Swift Optical/Ultraviolet Supernova Archive (SOUSA) paper but focusing on the mid-ultraviolet uvm2 filter.  The top plot shows the absolute magnitudes as a function of epoch for a prototype of most SN classes as observed with Swift/UVOT.  The right axis shows the redshift limit corresponding to a magnitude of uvm2=20 (a reasonable limit).  This could be useful for estimating the redshift range for particular supernova classes for Swift proposals or evaluating the observability of new supernovae now or at later epochs.  The bottom plot shows the uvm2-v colors to allow one to estimate the uvm2 magnitude based on a current or predicted optical magnitude, the type and phase.  If you use these plots, please cite the SOUSA paper they are based on.