Speaker
Description
We rarely have images of individual stars before they end their lives as supernovae. This makes the study of supernova, or more generally astrophysical transient environments invaluable for constraining their stellar progenitors. Much effort has been invested in studying the large populations of low redshift supernovae that have been uncovered in recent years, along with populations of gamma-ray bursts extending to much larger redshift. The results of these observations apparently suggested that GRBs are much more concentrated on their host light than core collapse supernovae, favouring an origin in massive stars. However, the GRBs were typically much more distant than the supernovae, and such an effect could also have been due to changes in the stellar populations with cosmic time. Now, thanks to JWST, we are able to study large populations of supernovae at $1 < z < 5$ for the first time. Here I present results of a study of the locations of $>100$ core collapse supernovae uncovered in the JADES field. We find that the distribution of supernovae is broadly consistent with that seen in the supernova population at low redshift, and inconsistent with the locations of the GRB population, suggesting genuine differences in the progenitor population. We also note a surprisingly large fraction of supernovae which appear not to lie directly on their putative host galaxies despite images of exceptional depth, and we speculate as to how this may reflect changes in environments of star formation between high and low-z.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 3 |
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