Rapidly Rising Transients from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Transient Survey

Abstract

We present rapidly rising transients discovered by a high-cadence transient survey with the Subaru telescope and Hyper Suprime-Cam. We discovered five transients at z=0.384–0.821, showing a rate of rise faster than 1 mag per day in the restframe near-ultraviolet wavelengths. The fast rate of rise and brightness are most similar to SN 2010aq and PS1-13arp, for which ultraviolet emission was detected within a few days after the shock breakout. The lower limit of the event rate of rapidly rising transients is ∼9% of core-collapse supernova rates, assuming the duration of rapid rise to be 1 day. We show that the light curves of the three faint objects agree with the cooling envelope emission from the explosion of red supergiants. The other two luminous objects, however, are brighter and faster than the cooling envelope emission. We interpret these two objects to be the shock breakout from a dense wind with a mass loss rate of ∼10−3 M yr−1, as also proposed for PS1-13arp. This mass loss rate is higher than that typically observed for red supergiants. The event rate of these luminous objects is 1% of the corecollapse supernova rate, and thus our study implies that more than ∼1% of massive stars can experience intense mass loss a few years before the explosion.