• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.237-240
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• 2015

Classical novae (CNe) are interacting binary systems whose outbursts are powered by a thermonuclear runaway in accreted material onto the surface of a white dwarf (WD). The secondary star in such systems fills its Roche lobe and material is transferred onto the WD primary star via an accretion disk. Recurrent novae (RNe) show many similarities to CNe, but have had more than one recorded outburst. RNe play an important role as one of the suspected progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae, which are used as primary distance indicators in cosmology. Thus, it is important to investigate the nature of their central binary systems to determine the relation between the parameters of the central system and the outburst type, and finally ascertain the population of novae that might be available to give rise to the progenitors of Type Ia SNe. A low outburst amplitude is adopted as a criterion that may help distinguish RNe from CNe and was therefore used to select targets for observations from ground-based observatories including the Liverpool Telescope and the Southern African Large Telescope as well as the full-sky space-based archive of the Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI). We found that at least four objects currently classified as CNe are possibly RNe candidates based on their quiescent spectra. We also searched the SMEI archive for additional outbursts of bright CNe that might otherwise have been missed but did not find a conclusive example.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.76.1-76.1
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• 2012

We have employed SNANA supernova analysis package to make YONSEI Supernova Catalogue 1, which contains distance modulus, light-curve shape parameters, and color or extinction values of each supernova. This database is used to study the dependence of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) luminosities on the host-galaxy morphologies. The redshift range of this catalogue is 0.010 < z < 1.555, and we use three light-curve fitters: SALT2, MLCS2k2 (Rv = 3.1), and MLCS2k2 (Rv = 1.7). We find a systematic difference in the Hubble residual (HR) of $0.1{\pm}0.031$ mag between E-S0 and Scd/Sd/Irr host-galaxies, and of $0.16{\pm}0.044$ mag between passive and star-burst host-galaxies. This difference is significant over the $3{\sigma}$ level. Considering the significant difference in the mean age of stellar population between these morphological types, the difference in the HR reported here suggests that the evolution effect of SNe Ia luminosity should be considered in the cosmological application of SNe Ia data.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.72.3-72.3
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• 2019

The observation of transient objects such as supernovae or variable stars requires a survey of the wide sky and quickly extracting the results. In accordance with this purpose, we have been developing an automatic observing software, KAOS (Kyung Hee University Automatic Observing Software) as a series. KAOS30 was the first series of KAOS and it was applied to the 30-inch platform at the McDonald Observatory in the United States of America. KAOS76 controls the 76-cm telescope at Kyung Hee Astronomical Observatory. In this poster, we introduce KAOS10 for controlling a portable telescope with a small aperture size attaching a guiding camera as QHY-5L II. Kyung Hee University auto-guiding package which includes the auto-guiding function for small aperture size telescope was also developed. Additionally, the Telescope Control Package(TCP) can communicate with the main server to do astrometry for pointing and identifying targets efficiently. KAOS10 has a universal interface that will be useful for the research of both amateurs and professionals.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.44.3-44.3
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• 2019

Massive stars, supernovae, and kilonovae are among the most luminous radiation sources in the universe. Observations usually show near- to mid-infrared (NIR-MIR, 1-5~micron) emission excess from H II regions around young massive star clusters (YMSCs) and anomalous dust extinction and polarization towards Type Ia supernova (SNe Ia). The popular explanation for such NIR-MIR excess and unusual dust properties is the predominance of small grains (size a<0.05micron) relative to large grains (a>0.1micron) in the local environment of these strong radiation sources. The question of why small grains are predominant in these environments remains a mystery. Here we report a new mechanism of dust destruction based on centrifugal stress within extremely fast rotating grains spun-up by radiative torques, namely the RAdiative Torque Disruption (RATD) mechanism, which can resolve this question. We find that RATD can destroy large grains located within a distance of ~ 1 pc from a massive star of luminosity L~ 10^4L_sun and a supernova. This increases the abundance of small grains relative to large grains and successfully reproduces the observed NIR-MIR excess and anomalous dust extinction/polarization. We show that small grains produced by RATD can also explain the steep far-UV rise in extinction curves toward starburst and high redshift galaxies, as well as the decrease of the escape fraction of Ly-alpha photons observed from HII regions surrounding YMSCs.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.59.4-59.4
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• 2019

In this talk, we will give an overview of the small telescope network project in Korea. The small telescope network is a project in planning that would gather 0.4m-1.0m telescopes in Korea together for a common use in research and education, and the project is being led by the Optical/IR Astronomy Division of KAS. Even in the era of giant telescopes, small telescopes are still competitive for various research topics that require rapid response or long-term, steady monitoring. There are quite a few small telescopes in Korea, but the research use of these telescope has been very limited. By organizing these telescopes together, the small telescope network hopes to bring these telescopes in full operation and offer Korean astronomers competitive observational resources. In this talk, we will outline the project, describe potential resources, and several science cases such as multi-messenger astronomy, supernovae, and AGN. We will also introduce how this project might be run, with the expected operation of the small network starting at 2020.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.52.2-52.2
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• 2019

In the last decades, the use of type Ia supernovae (SN) as standard candles has allowed us to understand the geometry of the Universe as they help to measure the expansion rate of the Universe, especially in combination with other cosmological probes such as the study of cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropies or the study of the imprint of baryonic acoustic oscillations on the galaxy clustering. Cosmological parameter constraints obtained with type Ia SN are mainly affected by intrinsic systematic errors. But there are other systematic effects related with the correlation of the observed brightness of Supernova and the large-scale structure of the Universe such as the effect of peculiar velocities and gravitational lensing. The former is relevant for SN at low redshifts while the latter starts being relevant for SN at higher redshifts. Gravitational lensing depends on how much matter is along the trajectory of each SN light beam. In order to account for this effect, we consider a statistical approach by defining the probability distribution (PDF) that a given supernova brightness is magnified by a given amount, for a particular redshift. We will show that different theoretical approaches to define the matter density along the light trajectory hugely affect the shape and width of the PDF. This may have catastrophic effects on cosmology fits using Supernova lensing as planned for surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey or future surveys such the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.48.4-49
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• 2020

We reconstruct the expansion history of the universe using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) in a manner independent of any cosmological model assumptions. To do so, we implement a nonparametric iterative smoothing method on the Joint Light-curve Analysis (JLA) data while exploring the SN Ia light-curve hyperparameter space by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We test to see how the posteriors of these hyperparameters depend on cosmology, whether using different dark energy models or reconstructions shift these posteriors. Our constraints on the SN Ia light-curve hyperparameters from our model-independent analysis are very consistent with the constraints from using different parameterizations of the equation of state of dark energy, namely the flat ΛCDM cosmology, the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder model, and the Phenomenologically Emergent Dark Energy (PEDE) model. This implies that the distance moduli constructed from the JLA data are mostly independent of the cosmological models. We also studied that the possibility the light-curve parameters evolve with redshift and our results show consistency with no evolution. The reconstructed expansion history of the universe and dark energy properties also seem to be in good agreement with the expectations of the standard ΛCDM model. However, our results also indicate that the data still allow for considerable flexibility in the expansion history of the universe. This work is published in ApJ.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.70.1-70.1
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• 2020

A type IIb supernova (SN IIb) is the result of core-collapse of a massive star which lost most of its hydrogen-rich envelope during its evolution. The pre-SN progenitor properties, such as the total radius and the mass of the hydrogen-rich envelope, can widely vary due to the mass-loss history of the progenitors. Optical light curves of SNe IIb are dominated by energy released by the hydrogen recombination and the radioactive decay of 56Ni in the early and late epochs respectively. This may result in distinctive double peaked light curves like the one observed in SN 1993J. The first peak, caused by the hydrogen recombination, can be modelled with numerical simulations providing information on the pre-SN progenitor properties. We compare two radiation-hydrodynamics codes, STELLA and SNEC, that are frequently used in SNe modelling, and investigate the effect of opacity treatment on the temporal evolution of the color temperature of SNe and eventually on the optical light curves. We find that with a proper treatment of the scattering opacity, SNe IIb models exploded from the progenitor models evolved with latest stellar evolution model hardly match the observational data. We also discuss the smaller scale features found in the models during hydrogen recombination phase.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.42.3-42.3
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• 2020

We investigate the observational properties of Wolf-Rayet stars, suggest the constraint of their mass-loss rate and apply our results to the observed progenitor candidates of Type Ib/Ic supernovae (iPTF13bvn and SN 2017ein). For this purpose, we adopt the WR star models with various mass-loss rates and wind terminal velocities. We obtain the high resolution spectra of those models at the pre-supernova phase using the radiative transfer code CMFGEN. We verify the optically faint property of SN Ic progenitors and show that the optical faintness is mainly originated by the high effective temperature at the photosphere. We also show that a simple analytic model for WR winds using a constant opacity can roughly predict the photospheric parameters. We show that the change of the mass-loss rate and the terminal wind velocity critically affects the optical luminosity. We find the optical luminosities of SN Ic progenitor models with our fiducial mass-loss rate prescription are fainter than the detection limits. We also suggest the mass-loss rate of WR stars may not exceed 2 times of our fiducial value by comparing our predictions with the detection limit of SN Ib/Ic progenitors. The directly observed progenitor candidate of iPTF13bvn can be explained by our SN Ib progenitor models. We find that the SN 2017ein progenitor candidate is too bright and too blue to be a SN Ic progenitor.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.35.1-35.1
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• 2021

RR Lyrae stars are sensitive probe for the precision stellar astrophysics and also for the cosmic distance scale thanks to their well-defined near-infrared Period-Luminosity relations (PLRs). These horizontal branch variables can be used for primary calibration of the first-rung of population II distance ladder providing an evaluation of the ongoing tension between Cepheid-Supernovae based Hubble constant and the Planck results. Therefore, absolute calibration of RR Lyrae PLRs is now crucial to complement or test the tip of the red giant branch based distances, and in turn, population II star based Hubble constant measurements. While the pulsation models of RR Lyrae can reproduce most observables, they predict a significant metallicity effect on their JHKs-band PLRs that is inconsistent with so-far limited observational studies. We remedy this inconsistency of metallicity dependence in RR Lyrae PLRs by combining their near-infrared observations in the globular clusters of different mean-metallicities with the new parallaxes from the Gaia early data release 3 (EDR3). Our empirical results on Period-Luminosity-Metallicity (PLZ)relations are consistent with theoretical predictions but the precision of absolute calibrations is still affected by the parallax uncertainties and the systematic zero-point offset present in the Gaia EDR3.