Giorgos

The remnants of core-collapse supernovae often present significant asymmetries while those of thermonuclear supernovae are, more or less, spherically symmetric. As superluminous supernovae (SLSN) do not occur in Milky Way-type galaxies (they prefer metal-poor starburst dwarfs), our chances of studying directly a SLSN remnant are very limited, except perhaps in the Magellanic clouds. Therefore, the only way of probing the SLSN geometry, and thus identifying potential SLSN remnant candidates, is through polarimetry of the explosions themselves. I will present the first polarimetric observations of SLSNe obtained through a dedicated ToO program at the VLT. LSQ14mo is a SLSN-I that showed only a very limited degree of polarisation (P = 0.52%), which corresponds to an upper limit of 10% in the photosphere asphericity. In addition, this signal can be entirely due to interstellar polarisation in the host galaxy. This is perhaps surprising as the leading models for H-poor SLSNe involve a magnetar or CSM interaction, i.e. configurations that are not expected to be spherically symmetric. Observations of a SLSN-II yielded a more significant degree of polarisation, while preliminary analysis for a SLSN-R reveals similarly low levels of asphericity as for LSQ14mo.