{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sn2023ixf-in-messier-101-a-variable-red","title":"SN2023ixf in Messier 101: A Variable Red Supergiant as the Progenitor Candidate to a Type II Supernova","arxiv_id":"2306.04722","date":"2023-06-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Charles D. Kilpatrick","Ryan J. Foley","Wynn V. Jacobson-Galán","Anthony L. Piro","Stephen J. Smartt","Maria R. Drout","Alexander Gagliano","Christa Gall","Jens Hjorth","David O. Jones","Kaisey S. Mandel","Raffaella Margutti","Conor L. Ransome","V. Ashley Villar","David A. Coulter","Hua Gao","David Jacob Matthews","Yossef Zenati"],"abstract":"We present pre-explosion optical and infrared (IR) imaging at the site of the type II supernova (SN II) 2023ixf in Messier 101 at 6.9 Mpc. We astrometrically registered a ground-based image of SN 2023ixf to archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer), and ground-based near-IR images. A single point source is detected at a position consistent with the SN at wavelengths ranging from HST $R$-band to Spitzer 4.5 $\\mu$m. Fitting to blackbody and red supergiant (RSG) spectral-energy distributions (SEDs), we find that the source is anomalously cool with a significant mid-IR excess. We interpret this SED as reprocessed emission in a 8600 $R_{\\odot}$ circumstellar shell of dusty material with a mass $\\sim$5$\\times10^{-5} M_{\\odot}$ surrounding a $\\log(L/L_{\\odot})=4.74\\pm0.07$ and $T_{\\rm eff}=3920\\substack{+200\\\\-160}$ K RSG. This luminosity is consistent with RSG models of initial mass 11 $M_{\\odot}$, depending on assumptions of rotation and overshooting. In addition, the counterpart was significantly variable in pre-explosion Spitzer 3.6 $\\mu$m and 4.5 $\\mu$m imaging, exhibiting $\\sim$70% variability in both bands correlated across 9 yr and 29 epochs of imaging. The variations appear to have a timescale of 2.8 yr, which is consistent with $\\kappa$-mechanism pulsations observed in RSGs, albeit with a much larger amplitude than RSGs such as $\\alpha$ Orionis (Betelgeuse).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04722v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04722v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sn2023ixf-in-messier-101-a-variable-red","repo_url":"https://github.com/charliekilpatrick/progenitors","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}