Spectropolarimetry of Extremely Luminous Type Ia Supernova 2009dc: Nearly Spherical Explosion of Super-Chandrasekhar Mass White Dwarf

Understand

We present the first spectropolarimetric observations of a candidate of super-Chandrasekhar mass Type Ia supernova (SN): SN 2009dc.

• The observations were performed at 5.6 and 89.5 days after the B-band maximum.
• The data taken at the later epoch are used to determine the interstellar polarization.
• Continuum polarization is found to be small (<0.3 %), indicating that the explosion is nearly spherically symmetric.