Optical Photometry of SN 1993J: Years 1995 to 2003

Abstract

In this paper, the late-time optical photometry of supernova (SN) 1993J in M81 from Feburary 1995 to Janurary 2003 is presented. The observations were performed in a set of intermediate-band filters that have the advantage of tracing the strength variations of some spectral features. SN 1993J was found to fade very slowly at late times, declining only by $0.05\pm0.02$ mag 100 d$^{-1}$ in most of the filters from 2 to nearly 10 yrs after discovery. Our data suggest that the circumstellar interaction provides most of the energy to power the late-time optical emission of SN 1993J. This is manifested by several flux peaks seen in the rough spectral energy distributions constructed from the multicolor light curves. The flux peaks near 6600 Å, 5800 Å and 4900 Å may correspond to the emission lines of H$α$, Na I D + He I $λ$5876 and [O III] $λλ$4959, 5007, respectively. The evolution of these emission lines suggest a power-law SN density model as proposed by \citet{cf94}.