On the progenitor and early evolution of the type II supernova 2009kr

Understand

We report the identification of a source coincident with SN 2009kr in HST pre-explosion images.

• The object appears to be a single point source with an intrinsic colour V-I = 1.1 and M_V = -7.6.
• If this is a single star it would be a yellow supergiant of log L/L_{sol} \sim 5.1 and a mass of 15 (+5/-4) M_{sol}.
• The spatial resolution does not allow us yet to definitively determine if the progenitor object is a single star, a binary system, or a compact cluster.