The Progenitor of the Type II-Plateau SN 2025pht in NGC 1637: The Dustiest, Most Luminous Red Supergiant So Far?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Van Dyk, Schuyler D., Szalai, Tamas, Anand, Gagandeep S., Brink, Thomas G., Zimmer, Noah, Milisavljevic, Dan, Fox, Ori D., Jencson, Jacob E., Zheng, WeiKang, Filippenko, Alexei V., Wyrzykowski, Lukasz, Mikolajczyk, Przemyslaw J., Kotysz, Krzysztof, Hambsch, F. -J., Wozniak, Agata, Zejmo, Michal, Reguitti, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Van Dyk, Schuyler D.
Szalai, Tamas
Anand, Gagandeep S.
Brink, Thomas G.
Zimmer, Noah
Milisavljevic, Dan
Fox, Ori D.
Jencson, Jacob E.
Zheng, WeiKang
Filippenko, Alexei V.
Wyrzykowski, Lukasz
Mikolajczyk, Przemyslaw J.
Kotysz, Krzysztof
Hambsch, F. -J.
Wozniak, Agata
Zejmo, Michal
Reguitti, Andrea
author_facet Van Dyk, Schuyler D.
Szalai, Tamas
Anand, Gagandeep S.
Brink, Thomas G.
Zimmer, Noah
Milisavljevic, Dan
Fox, Ori D.
Jencson, Jacob E.
Zheng, WeiKang
Filippenko, Alexei V.
Wyrzykowski, Lukasz
Mikolajczyk, Przemyslaw J.
Kotysz, Krzysztof
Hambsch, F. -J.
Wozniak, Agata
Zejmo, Michal
Reguitti, Andrea
contents We provide a characterization of the red supergiant (RSG) progenitor candidate for the nearby Type II-plateau supernova (SN) 2025pht in NGC 1637. The star was first detectable in 2001 by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and then again in a dozen bands by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2024. This "quasi-snapshot" of the star's nature almost immediately prior to explosion is unprecedented. The RSG varied in brightness, and we posit that it could have been a pulsating variable, possibly with a long period of ~660 days. The largest uncertainty is the host-galaxy distance, which we establish to be 11.67+/-0.27 Mpc. The star was also heavily extinguished by interstellar dust internal to the host, with visual extinction A_V(host)~1.7 mag (total A_V(tot)~1.8 mag). Dust radiative-transfer modeling reveals the star's circumstellar medium to be quite dusty and silicate-rich, yielding a bolometric luminosity as high as log(L_bol/L_Sun)=5.16+/-0.03 and a cool effective temperature T_eff=2100--2500 K. The available HST optical data had no bearing on the shape of the candidate's observed spectral energy distribution -- for the first time, without the archival JWST observations we would not have been able to detect and characterize the candidate at all. The SN 2025pht progenitor candidate, although quite similar to that of SN 2023ixf, may be the most luminous star identified to date.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09087
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Progenitor of the Type II-Plateau SN 2025pht in NGC 1637: The Dustiest, Most Luminous Red Supergiant So Far?
Van Dyk, Schuyler D.
Szalai, Tamas
Anand, Gagandeep S.
Brink, Thomas G.
Zimmer, Noah
Milisavljevic, Dan
Fox, Ori D.
Jencson, Jacob E.
Zheng, WeiKang
Filippenko, Alexei V.
Wyrzykowski, Lukasz
Mikolajczyk, Przemyslaw J.
Kotysz, Krzysztof
Hambsch, F. -J.
Wozniak, Agata
Zejmo, Michal
Reguitti, Andrea
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
We provide a characterization of the red supergiant (RSG) progenitor candidate for the nearby Type II-plateau supernova (SN) 2025pht in NGC 1637. The star was first detectable in 2001 by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and then again in a dozen bands by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2024. This "quasi-snapshot" of the star's nature almost immediately prior to explosion is unprecedented. The RSG varied in brightness, and we posit that it could have been a pulsating variable, possibly with a long period of ~660 days. The largest uncertainty is the host-galaxy distance, which we establish to be 11.67+/-0.27 Mpc. The star was also heavily extinguished by interstellar dust internal to the host, with visual extinction A_V(host)~1.7 mag (total A_V(tot)~1.8 mag). Dust radiative-transfer modeling reveals the star's circumstellar medium to be quite dusty and silicate-rich, yielding a bolometric luminosity as high as log(L_bol/L_Sun)=5.16+/-0.03 and a cool effective temperature T_eff=2100--2500 K. The available HST optical data had no bearing on the shape of the candidate's observed spectral energy distribution -- for the first time, without the archival JWST observations we would not have been able to detect and characterize the candidate at all. The SN 2025pht progenitor candidate, although quite similar to that of SN 2023ixf, may be the most luminous star identified to date.
title The Progenitor of the Type II-Plateau SN 2025pht in NGC 1637: The Dustiest, Most Luminous Red Supergiant So Far?
topic Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09087