Optical Tomography of Chemical Elements Synthesized in Type Ia Supernovae

We report the discovery of optical emission from the nonradiative shocked ejecta of three young type Ia supernova remnants (SNRs): SNR 0519-69.0, SNR 0509-67.5, and N103B. Deep integral field spectroscopic observations reveal broad and spatially resolved [Fe XIV] 5303 Å emission. The width of the broad line reveals, for the first time, the reverse shock speeds. For two of the remnants we can constrain the underlying supernova explosions with evolutionary models. SNR 0519-69.0 is well explained by a standard near-Chandrasekhar mass explosion, whereas for SNR 0509-67.5 our analysis suggests an energetic sub-Chandrasekhar mass explosion. With [S XII], [Fe IX], and [Fe XV] also detected, we can uniquely visualize different layers of the explosion. We refer to this new analysis technique as “supernova remnant tomography”.

Figure 1

RGB images of 0519-69.0 (a), 0509-67.5 (b), and N103B (c) showing in red x rays from Chandra ACIS, in blue $H\alpha$ (MUSE), and in green [Fe XIV] (MUSE). The regions from which the spectra were extracted are indicated by the yellow dots.

Figure 2

[Fe XIV] 5303 line profiles for 0519-69.0 (a), 0509-67.5 (b), and N103B (c) extracted from the regions indicated (yellow dots with black edges) in Fig. 1. The apertures are circular with 0.8 arc sec radii, corresponding to 1.96 square arc sec areas (49 MUSE spaxels). Shown in red are best-fitting Gaussians to the data, determined by a least-squares minimization.

Figure 3

(a) Left panel is RGB image of 0509-67.5 showing in red [S XII], in blue [Fe IX], and in green [Fe XIV]. (b) Right panel is image of 0509-67.5 in [Fe XV].