Massive star mergers and the recent transient in NGC 4490: a more massive cousin of V838 Mon and V1309 Sco

Some of the data reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, a joint facility of the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution. We thank the staffs at Lick and MMT Observatories for their assistance with the observations. We also appreciate the help of Jeff Silverman for some of the Lick observations. Data from Steward Observatory facilities were obtained as part of the observing programme AZTEC: Arizona Transient Exploration and Characterization. Lindsey Kabot assisted with early stages of the MMT spectral data reduction. The work presented here is based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. These are based in part on observations associated with programme #13364 (Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey, LEGUS). This paper has made use of the higher level data products provided by the LEGUS team.; NS and JEA received partial support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grants AST-1210599 and AST-1312221. MMK acknowledges support from the Carnegie-Princeton fellowship. Funding for this effort was provided in part by the Spitzer SPIRITS Cycles 10-12 exploration science programme. The supernova research of AVF's group at U.C. Berkeley presented here is supported by Gary & Cynthia Bengier, the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, and NSF grant AST-1211916. KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation, and the TABASGO Foundation. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. JJ is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1144469.

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