Paul Nugent

Max Weber's famous phrase the 'the disenchantment of the world' has been a catalyst for scholars from a wide array of disciplines to consider what humankind might have lost as modernity's rationality and intellectualism extinguished any widespread belief in magic, spirits, and gods. A review of these works shows that, despite Weber's pessimism, there is ample evidence of continued forms of enchantment in modernity as well as many viable strategies for reenchantment. However, while Weber's statements seemed to be centred on enchantments deriving from belief in metaphysical worlds and beings, the forms of enchantment found to be compatible with modernity are based in wonder. This paper asks if a metaphysicsbased form of enchantment can be compatible with modernity. I then argue that phenomenal consciousness is a modern mystery that can serve as the metaphysical foundation for a new form of enchantment that I call fascination.

The use of Type Ia supernovae as distance indicators led to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe a decade ago. Now that large second generation surveys have significantly increased the size and quality of the high-redshift sample, the cosmological constraints are limited by the currently available sample of ~50 cosmologically useful nearby supernovae. The Nearby Supernova Factory addresses this problem by discovering nearby supernovae and observing their spectrophotometric time development. Our data sample includes over 2400 spectra from spectral timeseries of 185 supernovae. This talk presents results from a portion of this sample including a Hubble diagram and a description of some analyses using this rich dataset.

© 2017 The Authors.We present optical spectra of the nearby Type Ia supernova SN 2011fe at 100, 205, 311, 349 and 578 d post-maximum light, as well as an ultraviolet spectrum obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope at 360 d post-maximum light. We compare these observations with synthetic spectra produced with the radiative transfer code PHOENIX. The day +100 spectrum can be well fitted with models that neglect collisional and radiative data for forbidden lines. Curiously, including these data and recomputing the fit yields a quite similar spectrum, but with different combinations of lines forming some of the stronger features. At day +205 and later epochs, forbidden lines dominate much of the optical spectrum formation; however, our results indicate that recombination, not collisional excitation, is the most influential physical process driving spectrum formation at these late times. Consequently, our synthetic optical and UV spectra at all epochs presented here are formed almost exclusively through recombinationdriven fluorescence. Furthermore, our models suggest that the UV spectrum even as late as day +360 is optically thick and consists of permitted lines from several iron-peak species. These results indicate that the transition to the 'nebular' phase in Type Ia supernovae is complex and highly wavelength dependent.

We discuss Monte Carlo techniques for addressing the three-dimensional time-dependent radiative transfer problem in rapidly expanding supernova atmospheres. The transfer code SEDONA has been developed to calculate the light curves, spectra, and polarization of aspherical supernova models. From the onset of free expansion in the supernova ejecta, SEDONA solves the radiative transfer problem self-consistently, including a detailed treatment of gamma-ray transfer from radioactive decay and with a radiative equilibrium solution of the temperature structure. Line fluorescence processes can also be treated directly. No free parameters need be adjusted in the radiative transfer calculation, providing a direct link between multidimensional hydrodynamic explosion models and observations. We describe the computational techniques applied in SEDONA and verify the code by comparison to existing calculations. We find that convergence of the Monte Carlo method is rapid and stable even for complicated multidimensional configurations. We also investigate the accuracy of a few commonly applied approximations in supernova transfer, namely, the stationarity approximation and the two-level atom expansion opacity formalism. © 2006. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

We present new results on the Hubble diagram of distant type Ia supernovae segregated according to the type of host galaxy. This makes it possible to check earlier evidence for a cosmological constant by explicitly comparing SNe residing in galaxies likely to contain negligible dust with the larger sample. The cosmological parameters derived from these SNe Ia hosted by presumed dust-free early-type galaxies support earlier claims for a cosmological constant, which we demonstrate at ≃5σ significance, and the internal extinction implied is small even for late-type systems. Thus, our data demonstrate that host galaxy extinction is unlikely to systematically dim distant SNe Ia in a manner that would produce a spurious cosmological constant. Our analysis is based on new Hubble Space Telescope STIS 'snapshot' images and Keck-II echellette spectroscopy at the locations of the SNe, spanning the redshift range 0 < z < 0.8. Selecting from the sample discovered by the Supernova Cosmology Project, we classify the host galaxies of 39 distant SNe using the combination of STIS imaging, Keck spectroscopy and ground-based broad-band photometry. The distant data are analysed in comparison with a low-redshift sample of 25 SNe Ia re-calibrated according to the precepts of the SCP. The scatter observed in the SNe Ia Hubble diagrams correlates closely with host galaxy morphology. We find this scatter is smallest for SNe Ia occurring in early-type hosts and largest for those occurring in late-type galaxies. Moreover, SNe residing in late-type hosts appear ≃0.14 ± 0.09 mag fainter in their light-curve-width-corrected luminosity than those in early-type hosts, as expected if a modest amount of dust extinction is a contributing factor. As in previous studies, these results are broadly independent of whether corrections based upon SN light-curve shapes are performed. We also use our high-redshift data set to search for morphological dependences in the SNe light curves, as are sometimes seen in lowredshift samples. No significant trends are found, possibly because the range of light-curve widths is too limited.

© 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.We present an optical nebular spectrum of the nearby Type Ia supernova 2011fe, obtained 981 d after explosion. SN 2011fe exhibits little evolution since the +593 d optical spectrum, but there are several curious aspects in this new extremely late-time regime. We suggest that the persistence of the ~5800 Å feature is due to Na I D, and that a new emission feature at ~7300 Å may be [Ca II]. Also, we discuss whether the new emission feature at ~6400 Å might be [Fe I] or the high-velocity hydrogen predicted by Mazzali et al. The nebular feature at 5200 Å exhibits a linear velocity evolution of ~350 km s-1 per 100 d from at least +220 to +980 d, but the line's shape also changes in this time, suggesting that line blending contributes to the evolution. At ~1000 d after explosion, flux from the SN has declined to a point where contribution from a luminous secondary could be detected. In this work, we make the first observational tests for a post-impact remnant star and constrain its temperature and luminosity to T ≳ 104 K and L ≲ 104 L⊙. Additionally, we do not see any evidence for narrow H α emission in our spectrum. We conclude that observations continue to strongly exclude many single-degenerate scenarios for SN 2011fe.

We present the first high-redshift Hubble diagram for Type II-P supernovae based on five events at redshift up to z ∼ 0.3. This diagram was constructed using photometry from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Supernova Legacy Survey and absorption-line spectroscopy from the Keck Observatory. The method used to measure distances to these Supernovae is based on recent work by Hamuy & Pinto and exploits a correlation between the absolute brightness of SNe II-P and the expansion velocities derived from the minimum of the Fe II λ5169 P Cygni feature observed during the plateau phases. We present three refinements to this method that significantly improve the practicality of measuring the distances of SNe II-P at cosmologically interesting redshifts. These are an extinction correction measurement based on the V-I colors at day 50, a cross-correlation measurement for the expansion velocity, and the ability to extrapolate such velocities accurately over almost the entire plateau phase. We apply this revised method to our data set of high-redshift SNe II-P and find that the resulting Hubble diagram has a scatter of only 0.26 mag, thus demonstrating the feasibility of measuring the expansion history, with present facilities, using a method independent of that based on supernovae of Type Ia. © 2006. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

We report on ground-based and HST imaging of the afterglow and host galaxy of the Gamma-Ray Burst of March 5, 2002. The GRB occurred in a R = 25.17 ± 0.14 galaxy, which apparently is part of an interacting system. The lightcurve of the optical afterglow shows a rebrightening, or at least a plateau, 12-16 days after the gamma-ray event. UBVRIK' multi-band imaging of the afterglow ∼12 days after the GRB reveals a blue spectral energy distribution. The SED is consistent with a power-law with a spectral index of β= -0.63 ± 0.16, but there is tentative evidence for deviations away from a power-law. Unfortunately, a spectroscopic redshift has not been secured for GRB 020305. From the SED we impose a redshift upper limit of z ≲2.8, hence excluding the pseudo redshift of 4.6 reported for this burst. We discuss the possibilities for explaining the lightcurve, SED and host galaxy properties for GRB 020305. The most natural interpretation of the lightcurve and the SED is an associated supernova. Our data can not precisely determine the redshift of the GRB. The most favoured explanation is a low redshift SN, but a higher redshift SN can not be excluded. We also discuss less likely scenarios not based on SNe, like a burst occurring in a z = 2.5 galaxy with an extinction curve similar to that of the Milky Way. © ESO 2005.

We present a self-consistent comparison of the rise times for low- and high-redshift Type Ia supernovae. Following previous studies, the early light curve is modeled using a t2 law, which is then mated with a modified Leibundgut template light curve. The best-fit t2 law is determined for ensemble samples of low- and high-redshift supernovae by fitting simultaneously for all light-curve parameters for all supernovae in each sample. Our method fully accounts for the nonnegligible covariance among the light-curve fitting parameters, which previous analyses have neglected. Contrary to recent results by Riess et al., we find fair to good agreement between the rise times of the low- and high-redshift Type Ia supernovae. The uncertainty in the rise time of the high-redshift Type Ia supernovae is presently quite large, making any search for evidence of evolution based on a comparison of rise times premature. Furthermore, systematic effects on rise-time determinations from the high-redshift observations, due to the form of the late-time light curve and the manner in which the light curves of these supernovae were sampled, can bias the high-redshift rise-time determinations by up to +3.6-1.9 days under extreme situations. The peak brightnesses - used for cosmology - do not suffer any significant bias, nor any significant increase in uncertainty.