ERRATUM: “ON THE PROGENITOR OF THE TYPE II-PLATEAU SN 2008cn IN NGC 4603” (2009, ApJ, 706, 1174)

A trend is emerging regarding the progenitor stars that give rise to the most common core-collapse supernovae (SNe), those of Type II-Plateau (II-P): they generally appear to be red supergiants with a limited range of initial masses, ∼8-16 M ⊙ .Here we consider another example, SN 2008cn, in the nearly faceon spiral galaxy NGC 4603.Even with limited photometric data, it appears that SN 2008cn is not a normal SN II-P, but is of the high-luminosity subclass.Through comparison of pre-and post-explosion images obtained with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we have isolated a supergiant star prior to explosion at nearly the same position as the SN.We provide evidence that this supergiant may well be the progenitor of the SN, although this identification is not entirely unambiguous.This is exacerbated by the distance to the host galaxy, 33.3 Mpc, making SN 2008cn the most distant SN II-P yet for which an attempt has been made to identify a progenitor star in pre-SN images.The progenitor candidate has a more yellow color ([V -I] 0 = 0.98 mag and T eff = 5200 ± 300 K) than generally would be expected and, if a single star, would require that it exploded during a "blue loop" evolutionary phase, which is theoretically not expected to occur.Nonetheless, we estimate an initial mass of M ini = 15 ± 2 M ⊙ for this star, which is within the expected mass range for SN II-P progenitors.The yellower color