Side nav buttonsSuperMACHO TeamPaperSuperMACHO SurveyGalactic SupernovaeWhat are light echoes?Home

Searching for Galactic Supernovae

These new echoes are from SN as old as the historical SNe in our Galaxy (see the table below) discovered by Kepler, Tycho, and others. The surface brightness of the Galaxy echoes from the Type Ia SNe (Kepler, Tycho, Lupus/1006) should be roughly the same as the LMC echoes. Scaling from the LMC data, we would expect the echoes of these historical supernovae to be roughly 4-10 deg from their SNRs, move at 30"/yr and be about 30" wide. The Core-Collapse (CC) SNe will be fainter (Crab/1054, Cas A, SN1181), but they still may be detectable. Once found, we can train 8m class telescopes to get spectra of the echoes, and actually type the supernovae. We will, in a sense, see the same light as Kepler and Tycho did.

Name
Date
Vmax
RA
DEC
Type
Distance (kpc)
Cas A  
1680:
6:
23:23.4
+58:50
CC
3.4
Kepler
1604
-2.5
17:30.6
-21:29
Type Ia
<6
Tycho
1572
-4
00:25.3
+64:09
Type Ia
3
3C 58
1181
0
02:06.0
+64:49
CC
3.2:
Crab
1054
-6
05:34.5
+22:01
CC
2
Lupus
1006
-9
15:02.8
-41:57
Type Ia:
2.2
RCW 86
185
-2
14:43.1
-62:28
CC
2.5:
Historical Supernovae in the Milky Way Galaxy