EARLY SUPERNOVAE LIGHT CURVES FOLLOWING THE SHOCK BREAKOUT

By E. Nakar, R. Sari. 2010

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first light from a supernova (SN) emerges once the SN shock breaks out of the stellar surface. The first light, typically a UV or X-ray flash, is followed by a broken power-law decay of the luminosity generated by radiation that leaks out of the expanding gas sphere. Motivated by recent detection of emission from very early stages of several SNe, we revisit the theory of shock breakout and the following emission, paying special attention to the photon–gas coupling and deviations from thermal equilibrium. We derive simple analytic light curves of SNe from various progenitors at early times. We find that for more compact progenitors, white dwarfs, Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs), and possibly more energetic blue-supergiant explosions, the observed radiation is out of thermal equilibrium at the breakout, during the planar phase (i.e., before the expanding gas doubles its radius), and during the early spherical phase. Therefore, during these phases we predict significantly higher temperatures than previous analysis that assumed equilibrium. When thermal equilibrium prevails, we find the location of the thermalization depth and its temporal evolution. Our results are useful for interpretation of early SN light curves. Some examples are (1) red supergiant SNe have an early bright peak in optical and UV flux, less than an hour after breakout. It is followed by a minimum at the end of the planar phase (about 10 hr), before it peaks again once the temperature drops to the observed frequency range. In contrast, WRs show only the latter peak in optical and UV. (2) Bright X-ray flares are expected from all core-collapse SNe types. (3) The light curve and spectrum of the initial breakout pulse hold information on the explosion geometry and progenitor wind opacity. Its spectrum in more compact progenitors shows a (nonthermal) power law and its light curve may reveal both the breakout diffusion time and the progenitor radius.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03c877036743ef0e2ecd85c54761b050ecd0d65e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Berger
2. B. Metzger
3. S. Smartt
4. A. Filippenko
5. Bing Zhang
6. N. Smith
7. F. Mannucci
8. D. Maoz

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. E. Nakar
2. T. Piran
3. E. Berger
4. D. Maoz
5. A. Piro
6. F. Mannucci
7. S. Smartt
8. Krzysztof Zbigniew Stanek

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the Progenitor Masses and Dense Circumstellar Material of Type II Supernovae (2017, background): “In the more realistic case, the observed temperature is set in a region deeper than the photosphere, where radiation processes are able to couple the gas and radiation (Nakar & Sari 2010).”
• Early-time light curves of Type Ib/c supernovae from the SDSS-II Supernova Survey (2014, background): “Given the compact nature of their progenitors, SNe Ib/c are expected to emit a short burst of high energy (soft γ-rays, X-ray, see Nakar & Sari 2010) radiation at the moment of shock breakout, which should last not more than ∼15 minutes.”
• DISCOVERY, PROGENITOR AND EARLY EVOLUTION OF A STRIPPED ENVELOPE SUPERNOVA iPTF13bvn (2013, background): “…is the early light curve of a supernova, which is sensitive to the progenitor size, explosion energy and the composition of the outer layers (e.g., Nakar & Sari 2010; Rabinak & Waxman 2011; Bersten et al. 2012; Piro & Nakar 2013), and in some propitious cases can even diagnose the presence of a…”
• Light-curve modelling of superluminous supernova 2006gy: collision between supernova ejecta and a dense circumstellar medium (2012, background): “They assume that the CSM is optically thick enough to cause a shock breakout within it (e.g. Weaver 1976; Nakar & Sari 2010, see also Ofek et al. 2010; Balberg & Loeb 2011 with regard to shock breakout in a dense CSM).”
• Pan-STARRS1 DISCOVERY OF TWO ULTRALUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AT z ≈ 0.9 (2011, background): “Numerous works (e.g., Ensman & Burrows 1992; Katz et al. 2010; Nakar & Sari 2010) find that the radiation or color temperature of the shock breakout emission is higher than the effective temperature (defined by the luminosity surface density L/4πr2).”
• A COMPACT DEGENERATE PRIMARY-STAR PROGENITOR OF SN 2011fe (2011, unknown): “A number of analytical models for the early luminosity have been constructed under the assumption of spherical symmetry (e.g., Chevalier 1992; Chevalier & Fransson 2008; Piro et al. 2010; Kasen 2010; Nakar & Sari 2010; Rabinak & Waxman 2011; Rabinak et al. 2011).”
• Unifying Type II Supernova Light Curves with Dense Circumstellar Material (2016, background): “The position of the luminosity shell is found from the condition t̂diff = t − t0, where tdiff = tdiff(r, t) is the diffusion time at each moment of time and at each depth, and the hat indicates the value of this quantity taken specifically at the luminosity shell (Nakar & Sari 2010).”
• OBSERVING THE NEXT GALACTIC SUPERNOVA (2013, methodology): “This is an important assumption (see, e.g., the discussion in Nakar & Sari 2010), and requires careful consideration as part of any full design study of our proposal for a Galactic SBO detection system in Appendix A or extragalactic SBO detection system in Appendix B. Sapir et al. (2013) find that…”
• A cocoon shock breakout as the origin of the γ-ray emission in GW170817 (2017, methodology): “When the shock is fast enough (& 0.05c in the upstream frame) the radiation behind the shock falls out of thermal equilibrium (Weaver 1976; Katz et al. 2010; Nakar & Sari 2010).”
• GENERALIZED SEMI-ANALYTICAL MODELS OF SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVES (2011, background): “…that the CSM optical depth is smaller than the characteristic optical thickness of a radiation-dominated and radiation-mediated shock, c/vsh, and thus in the regime considered by Nakar & Sari (2010) who calculate shock breakout LCs for a variety of SN progenitors (see also Ensman & Burrows 1992).”
• The Cow: Discovery of a Luminous, Hot, and Rapidly Evolving Transient (2018, background): “Proposed scenarios include SN shock breakout in a surrounding wind (e.g. Ofek et al. 2010), cooling low-mass envelopes after a SN shock breakout (Nakar & Sari 2010; Kleiser & Kasen 2014), a magnetar-powered binary neutron star merger (Gao et al. 2013; Yu et al. 2013; Metzger & Piro 2014), and an…”
• SHOCK BREAKOUT IN DENSE MASS LOSS: LUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE (2011, background): “H E ] 2 5 Ja n 20 Matzner & McKee 1999; Nakar & Sari 2010).”
• Observational Clues to the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae (2013, background): “…evolution of a SN Ia, starting from the time of explosion, has been recently studied in a number of theory papers (Höflich & Schaefer 2009; Kasen 2010; Nakar & Sari 2010, 2012; Piro, Chang & Weinberg 2010; Piro & Nakar 2012, 2013; Rabinak, Livne & Waxman 2012; Rabinak & Waxman 2011).”
• THE OBSERVABLE SIGNATURES OF GRB COCOONS (2016, methodology): “Various authors (Kulkarni et al. 1998; Tan et al. 2001; MacFadyen et al. 2001; Campana et al. 2006; Wang et al. 2007; Katz et al. 2010; Nakar & Sari 2010; Bromberg et al. 2011a) suggested that the emission from the shock breakout of chocked jets’ cocoons produce the low luminosity GRBs (llGRBs).”
• RAPIDLY EVOLVING AND LUMINOUS TRANSIENTS FROM PAN-STARRS1 (2014, background): “…the progenitor, with larger progenitors yielding more luminous events (due to both a larger emitting surface and reduced effects of adiabatic cooling), while the timescale of the event is related to the envelope mass that is cooling/recombining (see, e.g., Nakar & Sari 2010; Rabinak & Waxman 2011).”
• TOWARD CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TYPE IIP SUPERNOVA PROGENITOR POPULATION: A STATISTICAL SAMPLE OF LIGHT CURVES FROM Pan-STARRS1 (2014, background): “Note that the nonlinear behavior of the light curve during the rise, due to shock breakout and post-shock breakout cooling envelope effects (see e.g. Nakar & Sari 2010; Rabinak & Waxman 2011) are not captured by the power law rise model, but the explosion epoch itself is fit accurately in the…”