This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Under this award, Dr. P. Frank Winkler (Middlebury College) will carry out a program of research with the overarching theme of increasing our understanding of how supernovae explode, how their prodigious energy release affects their host galaxies, and how they contribute to the chemical evolution of the Universe. For core-collapse supernovae, both models and observations indicate that the explosions are not spherically symmetric. New measurements of proper motions and Doppler velocities in the young Galactic remnants Puppis A and G292.0+1.8 will provide three-dimensional models for asymmetries in the surviving ejecta fragments. Furthermore, chemical abundances inferred from spectra can tie present filaments to their origin in specific core layers of the progenitor stars. The expansion of young Type Ia supernova remnants, including Tycho (SN 1572) and RCW86 (SN 185), will be measured through proper motions of Balmer filaments that delineate their shells. These will then be combined with spectroscopic determination of the shock velocity to obtain reliable distances for the first time.
The Magellanic Cloud Emission-Line Survey (MCELS) surveyed both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our nearest neighbor galaxies, from the 0.6-meter Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. An important goal early in the project will be to bring to publication MCELS-based catalogs of planetary nebulae and supernovae remnants (SNRs), including the first comprehensive flux measurements. All the MCELS image data will be made easily available on-line. A final legacy project will be compilation of an Emission-Line Atlas of Galactic SNRs, based on CCD images in lines of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, the first such images to be published in most cases.
