The destruction and survival of dust in the shell around SN 2008S

SN 2008S erupted in early 2008 in the grand design spiral galaxy NGC 6946. The progenitor was detected by Prieto et al. in Spitzer Space Telescope images taken over the four years prior to the explosion, but was not detected in deep optical images, from which they inferred a self‐obscured object with a mass of about 10 M⊙. We obtained Spitzer observations of SN 2008S 5 days after its discovery, as well as coordinated Gemini and Spitzer optical …