Schedule Aug 21, 2009
Properties of Over-luminous SNe and Peculiar Transients
Emmanouil Chatzopoulos (Univ. Texas - Austin)

Chatzopoulos, E., Wheeler, J.C. and Vinko, J.

We revisit the physical properties of the five brightest supernovae ever, most of them discovered by the ROTSE collaboration and present results on the recently-discovered supernova SN 2008am, an ultra-bright Type-IIn at a red shift of 0.234. We investigate a variety of models based on diffusion or shock interaction for each object. We also present analyses of the peculiar transient events SCP06F6 and a peculiar transient discovered by the ROTSE collaboration that has an unusual spectral and light curve evolution. This event is consistent with neither an AGN outburst, nor a SN, nor a tidal disruption event and its true nature remains a mystery.

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