Seeing double: the frequency and detectability of double-peaked superluminous supernova light curves

Understand

The discovery of double-peaked light curves in some superluminous supernovae offers an important new clue to their origins.

• We examine the published photometry of all Type Ic SLSNe, finding 14 objects with constraining data or limits around the time of explosion.
• Of these, 8 (including the already identified SN 2006oz and LSQ14bdq) show plausible flux excess at the earliest epochs, which deviate significantly (2-9$\sigma$) from polynomial fits to the rising light curves.
• Simple scaling of the LSQ14bdq data show that they are all consistent with a similar double-peaked structure.