Caltech Optical Observatories

We identify the progenitor star of SN 2023ixf in Messier 101 using Keck/NIRC2 adaptive optics imaging and pre-explosion HST/ACS images. The supernova, localized with diffraction spikes and high-precision astrometry, unambiguously coincides with a progenitor candidate of m = 24.87 ± 0.05 (AB).

The identification of extragalactic fast optical transients (eFOTs) as potential multi-messenger sources is one of the main challenges in time-domain astronomy. However, recent developments have allowed for probes of rapidly-evolving transients. With the increasing number of alert streams from optical time-domain surveys, the next paradigm is building technologies to rapidly identify the most interesting transients for follow-up.

The detection of GW170817 (Abbott et al. 2017a) and its associated electromagnetic transients AT2017gfo (Smartt et al. 2017; Coulter et al. 2017; Abbott et al. 2017d) and GRB170817A (Goldstein et al. 2017; Savchenko et al. 2017; Abbott et al. 2017c) has accelerated the field of multimessenger astronomy. In particular, this single event has increased our knowledge of the neutron star equation of state (Bauswein et al. 2017; Margalit & Metzger 2017; Annala et al. 2018; Coughlin et al. 2018; Most et al.