Long-rising Type II Supernovae in the Zwicky Transient Facility Census of the Local Universe

Year: 2023 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad036f

SN 1987A was an unusual hydrogen-rich core-collapse supernova originating from a blue supergiant star. Similar blue supergiant explosions remain a small family of events, and are broadly characterized by their long rises to peak. The Zwicky Transient Facility Census of the Local Universe (CLU) experiment aims to construct a spectroscopically complete sample of transients occurring in galaxies from the CLU galaxy catalog. We identify 13 long-rising (>40 days) Type II supernovae from the volume-limited CLU experiment during a 3.5 yr period from 2018 June to 2021 December, approximately doubling the previously known number of these events. We present photometric and spectroscopic data of these 13 events, finding peak r-band absolute magnitudes ranging from −15.6 to −17.5 mag and the tentative detection of Ba ii lines in nine events. Using our CLU sample of events, we derive a long-rising Type II supernova rate of 1.37_(−0.30)^(+0.26) × 10⁻⁶ Mpc−3 yr−1, ≈1.4% of the total core-collapse supernova rate. This is the first volumetric rate of these events estimated from a large, systematic, volume-limited experiment.