Keele Research Repository

This thesis presents the first population study of supernova remnants (SNRs) in one whole galaxy – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) on submm and FIR wavelengths. The first part is about the dust production in supernovae (SNe) and SNRs, based on several observations of SN1987A on mm and submm wavelengths that I made using the ATCA and APEX telescopes. SN1987A is found to produce ∼0.7 M⊙ of dust, which is 2 orders of magnitude higher than the masses found in most of other SN/SNR observations. I constrained the spectral energy distribution (SED) of SN1987A, confirming Herschel data using better resolution, but did not manage to resolve the object. These data were used in the preparation of the ALMA observations (Kamenetzky et al. 2013; Indebetouw et al. 2014).

The second part of the thesis is the population study of all LMC SNRs using Herschel and Spitzer data, which resulted in the conclusion that SNRs are significant dust destroyers. This conclusion is based on dust mass maps of SNRs and their surroundings which have shown that there is less dust within SNRs than outside. My study shows that a SNR in the LMC removes on average 4–6 M⊙. I conclude that SNRs might not be the main suppliers of dust in galaxies, and that it is possible that other sources of dust production are needed to explain the origin of the dust at high red-shifts. I estimate the mass of sputtered dust from all SNRs in LMC to be ∼373+746 249 M⊙, a dust destruction rate in the LMC of ∼0.037+0.074 −0.025 M⊙ yr−1 due to SNRs and an average lifetime for interstellar dust in the regions close to SNRs of ∼2+4 −1.3 × 107 yr.