Context. Core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) have long been considered to contribute significantly to the cosmic dust budget. Newly-formed dust in the SN ejecta cools quickly and is therefore detectable at mid-infrared (mid-IR) wavelengths. However, before the era of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), direct observational evidence for dust condensation was found in only a handful of nearby CCSNe, and dust masses (∼10−2−10−3 M, generally limited to <5 yr and to >500 K temperatures) have been two to three orders of magnitude smaller than theoretical predictions and dust amounts found by far-IR/submillimeter observations of Galactic SN remnants and in the very nearby SN 1987A. Aims. As recently demonstrated, the combined angular resolution and mid-IR sensitivity of JWST finally allow hidden cool (∼100-200 K) dust reservoirs in extragalactic SNe beyond SN 1987A to be revealed. Our team received JWST/MIRI time for studying a larger sample of CCSNe to fill the currently existing gap in their dust formation histories. The first observed target of this program was the well-known Type IIb SN 1993J that appeared in M81. Methods. We generated its spectral energy distribution (SED) from the current JWST/MIRI F770W, F1000W, F1500W, and F2100W fluxes. We fit single- and two-component silicate and carbonaceous dust models to the SED in order to determine the dust parameters. Results. We find that SN 1993J still contains a significant amount (∼0.01 M) of dust ∼30 yr after explosion. Comparing our results to those from the analysis of earlier Spitzer Space Telescope data, we observed a similar amount of dust as was detected ∼15-20 yr ago, but at a lower temperature (noting that the modeling results of the earlier Spitzer SEDs have strong limitations). We also found residual background emission near the SN site (after point-spread-function subtraction on the JWST/MIRI images) that may plausibly be attributed to an IR echo from more distant interstellar dust grains heated by the SN shock-breakout luminosity or ongoing star formation in the local environment.

Strongly lensed supernovae (SNe) are a rare class of transient that can offer tight cosmological constraints that are complementary to methods from other astronomical events. We present a follow-up study of one recently discovered strongly lensed SN, the quadruply imaged type Ia SN 2022qmx (aka "SN Zwicky"), at z = 0.3544. We measure updated, template-subtracted photometry for SN Zwicky and derive improved time delays and magnifications. This is possible because SNe are transient, fading away after reaching their peak brightness. Specifically, we measure point-spread-function photometry for all four images of SN Zwicky in three Hubble Space Telescope WFC3/UVIS passbands (F475W, F625W, and F814W) and one WFC3/IR passband (F160W), with template images taken ∼11 months after the epoch in which the SN images appear. We find consistency to within 2σ between lens-model-predicted time delays (≲1 day) and measured time delays with HST colors (≲2 days), including the uncertainty from chromatic microlensing that may arise from stars in the lensing galaxy. The standardizable nature of SNe Ia allows us to estimate absolute magnifications for the four images, with images A and C being elevated in magnification compared to lens model predictions by about 6σ and 3σ, respectively, confirming previous work. We show that millilensing or differential dust extinction is unable to explain these discrepancies, and we find evidence for the existence of microlensing in images A, C, and potentially D that may contribute to the anomalous magnification.

For approximately a decade, we have finally entered the era of discoveries of multiply imaged gravitationally lensed supernovae. To date, all cluster-lensed supernovae, very distant, faint and spatially resolved, have been found from space. In contrast, those deflected by individual galaxies have been very compact and bright enough to be identified with wide-field ground-based surveys through the magnification of the ‘standard candles’ method, i.e. without the need to spatially resolve the individual images. We review the challenges in identifying these extremely rare events, as well as the unique opportunities they offer for two major applications: time-delay cosmography and the study of the properties of deflecting bodies acting as lenses.

This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Multi-messenger gravitational lensing (Part 1)’.

Context. Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) cosmology studies will soon be dominated by systematic, uncertainties, rather than statistical ones. Thus, it is crucial to understand the unknown phenomena potentially affecting their luminosity that may remain, such as astrophysical biases. For their accurate application in such studies, SN Ia magnitudes need to be standardised; namely, they must be corrected for their correlation with the light-curve width and colour.

Aims. Here, we investigate how the standardisation procedure used to reduce the scatter of SN Ia luminosities is affected by their environment. Our aim is to reduce scatter and improve the standardisation process.

Methods. We first studied the SN Ia stretch distribution, as well as its dependence on environment, as characterised by local and global (g − z) colour and stellar mass. We then looked at the standardisation parameter, α, which accounts for the correlation between residuals and stretch, along with its environment dependency and linearity. Finally, we computed the magnitude offsets between SNe in different astrophysical environments after the colour and stretch standardisations (i.e. steps). This analysis has been made possible thanks to the unprecedented statistics of the volume-limited Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) SN Ia DR2 sample.

Results. The stretch distribution exhibits a bimodal behaviour, as previously found in the literature. However, we find the distribution to be dependent on environment. Specifically, the mean stretch modes decrease with host stellar mass, at a 9.2σ significance. We demonstrate, at the 13.4σ level, that the stretch-magnitude relation is non-linear, challenging the usual linear stretch-residuals relation currently used in cosmological analyses. In fitting for a broken-α model, we did indeed find two different slopes between stretch regimes (x₁ ≶  with  = −0.48 ± 0.08): α_low = 0.271 ± 0.011 and α_high = 0.083 ± 0.009, comprising a difference of Δα = −0.188 ± 0.014. As the relative proportion of SNe Ia in the high-stretch and low-stretch modes evolves with redshift and environment, this implies that a single-fitted α also evolves with the redshift and environment. Concerning the environmental magnitude offset γ, we find it to be greater than 0.12 mag, regardless of the considered environmental tracer used (local or global colour and stellar mass), all measured at the ≥5σ level. When accounting for the non-linearity of the stretch, these steps increase to ∼0.17 mag, measured with a precision of 0.01 mag. Such strong results highlight the importance of using a large volume-limited dataset to probe the underlying SN Ia-host correlations.

The study of supernova (SN) siblings, supernovae with the same host galaxy, is an important avenue for understanding and measuring the properties of Type Ia SN Ia light curves (LCs). Thus far, sibling analyses have mainly focused on optical LC data. Considering that LCs in the near-infrared (NIR) are expected to be better standard candles than those in the optical, we carry out the first analysis compiling SN siblings with only NIR data. We perform an extensive literature search of all SN siblings and find six sets of siblings with published NIR photometry. We calibrate each set of siblings ensuring they are on homogeneous photometric systems, fit the LCs with the SALT3-NIR and SNooPy models, and find median absolute differences in μ values between siblings of 0.248 and 0.186 mag, respectively. To evaluate the significance of these differences beyond measurement noise, we run simulations that mimic these LCs and provide an estimate for uncertainty on these median absolute differences of ∼0.052 mag, and we find that, statistically, our analysis rules out the nonexistence of intrinsic scatter in the NIR at the 99% level. When comparing the same sets of SN siblings, we observe a median absolute difference in μ values between siblings of 0.177 mag when using optical data alone as compared to 0.186 mag when using NIR data alone. It is unclear if these results may be due to limited statistics or poor quality NIR data, all of which will be improved with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Nebular-phase observations of peculiar Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) provide important constraints on progenitor scenarios and explosion dynamics for both these rare SNe and the more common, cosmologically useful SNe Ia. We present observations from an extensive ground- and space-based follow-up campaign to characterize SN 2022pul, a super-Chandrasekhar mass SN Ia (alternatively "03fg-like" SN), from before peak brightness to well into the nebular phase across optical to mid-infrared (MIR) wavelengths. The early rise of the light curve is atypical, exhibiting two distinct components, consistent with SN Ia ejecta interacting with dense carbon–oxygen (C/O)-rich circumstellar material (CSM). In the optical, SN 2022pul is most similar to SN 2012dn, having a low estimated peak luminosity (M_B = −18.9 mag) and high photospheric velocity relative to other 03fg-like SNe. In the nebular phase, SN 2022pul adds to the increasing diversity of the 03fg-like subclass. From 168 to 336 days after peak B-band brightness, SN 2022pul exhibits asymmetric and narrow emission from [O i] λλ6300, 6364 (FWHM ≈ 2000 km s⁻¹), strong, broad emission from [Ca ii] λλ7291, 7323 (FWHM ≈ 7300 km s⁻¹), and a rapid Fe iii to Fe ii ionization change. Finally, we present the first ever optical-to-MIR nebular spectrum of an 03fg-like SN Ia using data from JWST. In the MIR, strong lines of neon and argon, weak emission from stable nickel, and strong thermal dust emission (with T ≈ 500 K), combined with prominent [O i] in the optical, suggest that SN 2022pul was produced by a white dwarf merger within C/O-rich CSM.

We present an analysis of ground-based and JWST observations of SN 2022pul, a peculiar "03fg-like" (or "super-Chandrasekhar") Type Ia supernova (SN Ia), in the nebular phase at 338 days postexplosion. Our combined spectrum continuously covers 0.4–14 μm and includes the first mid-infrared spectrum of a 03fg-like SN Ia. Compared to normal SN Ia 2021aefx, SN 2022pul exhibits a lower mean ionization state, asymmetric emission-line profiles, stronger emission from the intermediate-mass elements (IMEs) argon and calcium, weaker emission from iron-group elements (IGEs), and the first unambiguous detection of neon in a SN Ia. A strong, broad, centrally peaked [Ne ii] line at 12.81 μm was previously predicted as a hallmark of "violent merger" SN Ia models, where dynamical interaction between two sub-M_Ch white dwarfs (WDs) causes disruption of the lower-mass WD and detonation of the other. The violent merger scenario was already a leading hypothesis for 03fg-like SNe Ia; in SN 2022pul it can explain the large-scale ejecta asymmetries seen between the IMEs and IGEs and the central location of narrow oxygen and broad neon. We modify extant models to add clumping of the ejecta to reproduce the optical iron emission better, and add mass in the innermost region (<2000 km s⁻¹) to account for the observed narrow [O i] λλ6300, 6364 emission. A violent WD–WD merger explains many of the observations of SN 2022pul, and our results favor this model interpretation for the subclass of 03fg-like SNe Ia.

Accurate classification of transients obtained from spectroscopic data are important to understand their nature and discover new classes of astronomical objects. For supernovae (SNe), SNID, NGSF (a Python version of SUPERFIT), and DASH are widely used in the community. Each tool provides its own metric to help determine classification, such as rlap of SNID, chi2/dof of NGSF, and Probability of DASH. However, we do not know how accurate these tools are, and they have not been tested with a large homogeneous data set. Thus, in this work, we study the accuracy of these spectral classification tools using 4646 SEDMachine spectra, which have accurate classifications obtained from the Zwicky Transient Facility Bright Transient Survey (BTS). Comparing our classifications with those from BTS, we have tested the classification accuracy in various ways. We find that NGSF has the best performance (overall Accuracy 87.6% when samples are split into SNe Ia and Non-Ia types), while SNID and DASH have similar performance with overall Accuracy of 79.3% and 76.2%, respectively. Specifically for SNe Ia, SNID can accurately classify them when rlap > 15 without contamination from other types, such as Ibc, II, SLSN, and other objects that are not SNe (Purity > 98%). For other types, determining their classification is often uncertain. We conclude that it is difficult to obtain an accurate classification from these tools alone. This results in additional human visual inspection effort being required in order to confirm the classification. To reduce this human visual inspection and to support the classification process for future large-scale surveys, this work provides supporting information, such as the accuracy of each tool as a function of its metric.

Supernova (SN) SN H0pe is a gravitationally lensed, triply imaged, Type Ia SN (SN Ia) discovered in James Webb Space Telescope imaging of the PLCK G165.7+67.0 cluster of galaxies. Well-observed multiply imaged SNe provide a rare opportunity to constrain the Hubble constant (H-0), by measuring the relative time delay between the images and modeling the foreground mass distribution. SN H0pe is located at z = 1.783 and is the first SN Ia with sufficient light-curve sampling and long enough time delays for an H-0 inference. Here we present photometric time-delay measurements and SN properties of SN H0pe. Using JWST/NIRCam photometry, we measure time delays of Delta t(ab) = -116.6(-9.3)(+10.8) observer-frame days and Delta t(cb) = -48.6(-4.0)(+3.6) observer-frame days relative to the last image to arrive (image 2b; all uncertainties are 1 sigma), which corresponds to a similar to 5.6% uncertainty contribution for H-0 assuming 70 km s(-1) Mpc(-1). We also constrain the absolute magnification of each image to mu(a) = 4.3(-1.8)(+1.6), mu(b) = 7.6(-2.6)(+3.6), mu(c) = 6.4(-1.5)(+1.6) by comparing the observed peak near-IR magnitude of SN H0pe to the nonlensed population of SNe Ia.

SN H0pe is a triply imaged supernova (SN) at redshift z = 1.78 discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope. In order to classify the SN spectroscopically and measure the relative time delays of its three images (designated A, B, and C), we acquired NIRSpec follow-up spectroscopy spanning 0.6-5 μm. From the high signal-to-noise spectra of the two bright images B and C, we first classify the SN, whose spectra most closely match those of SN 1994D and SN 2013dy, as a Type Ia SN. We identify prominent blueshifted absorption features corresponding to Si ii λ6355 and Ca ii H λ3970 and K λ3935. We next measure the absolute phases of the three images from our spectra, which allow us to constrain their relative time delays. The absolute phases of the three images, determined by fitting the three spectra to Hsiao07 SN templates, are 6.5 − 1.8 + 2.4 days, 24.3 − 3.9 + 3.9 days, and 50.6 − 15.3 + 16.1 days for the brightest to faintest images. These correspond to relative time delays between Image A and Image B and between Image B and Image C of − 122.3 − 43.8 + 43.7 days and 49.3 − 14.7 + 12.2 days, respectively. The SALT3-NIR model yields phases and time delays consistent with these values. After unblinding, we additionally explored the effect of using Hsiao07 template spectra for simulations through 80 days instead of 60 days past maximum, and found a small (11.5 and 1.0 days, respectively) yet statistically insignificant (∼0.25σ and ∼0.1σ) effect on the inferred image delays.