Dust models for the extinction of Type IIn supernova SN 2010jl

Abstract

ABSTRACT The unusual extinction curves of SN 2010jl provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the properties of dust formed by core-collapse supernovae. By using a series of dust models with different compositions and grain size distributions, we fit the extinction curves of SN 2010jl and find that a silicate–graphite mixture dust model characterized by exponentially cut-off power-law size distributions can well reproduce its unusual extinction curves. The best-fitting results show that the extinctions derived from the dust models are consistent with the observed values at all epochs. However, the total-to-selective extinction ratio RV is ∼2.8–3.1, which is significantly smaller than the value of RV ≈ 6.4 derived by Gall et al. The best-fitting models indicate that the dust grains around SN 2010jl are possibly composed of small-sized astronomical silicate grains and micron-sized graphite grains. In addition, by fitting the optical to mid-infrared spectral energy distribution, we find that the dust mass around SN 2010jl increases with time, up to $0.005\, \mathrm{ M}_{\odot }$ around 1300 d after peak brightness, which is consistent with previous estimates (Gall et al.; Sarangi et al.).