Lunch Talk: Sonja Panjkov (Univeristy of Melbourne)

Supernovae play an important role on the cosmological stage, however key questions persist regarding their nature. In this talk, I will discuss how supernova remnant properties can be used to better understand the progenitor star, including its mass and supernova type. More specifically, I will show how the star formation history maps of Harris and Zaritsky (2009) can be used to constrain the progenitor masses of the Large Magellanic Cloud core-collapse remnants. These results support the theoretical predictions of successful core-collapse supernovae from high mass progenitors, going some way in addressing the Red Supergiant Problem (Smartt et al., 2009).  Then, since Type Ia remnants are more circular and mirror-symmetric than core-collapse remnants (Lopez et al., 2009), I quantify the level of asymmetry in the X-ray emission of the Small Magellanic Cloud remnants, and from this I predict the likely SN type for each remnant. Finally, I will discuss how the morphologies of certain key emission lines vary amongst the population of Galactic and Magellanic Cloud remnants, and how this relates to the underlying supernova mechanism.