ANALYTICAL LIGHT CURVE MODELS OF SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE: χ2-MINIMIZATION OF PARAMETER FITS

By E. Chatzopoulos, J. C. Wheeler, J. Vinkó, Z. Horváth, A. Nagy. 2013

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present fits of generalized semi-analytic supernova (SN) light curve (LC) models for a variety of power inputs including 56Ni and 56Co radioactive decay, magnetar spin-down, and forward and reverse shock heating due to supernova ejecta–circumstellar matter (CSM) interaction. We apply our models to the observed LCs of the H-rich superluminous supernovae (SLSN-II) SN 2006gy, SN 2006tf, SN 2008am, SN 2008es, CSS100217, the H-poor SLSN-I SN 2005ap, SCP06F6, SN 2007bi, SN 2010gx, and SN 2010kd, as well as to the interacting SN 2008iy and PTF 09uj. Our goal is to determine the dominant mechanism that powers the LCs of these extraordinary events and the physical conditions involved in each case. We also present a comparison of our semi-analytical results with recent results from numerical radiation hydrodynamics calculations in the particular case of SN 2006gy in order to explore the strengths and weaknesses of our models. We find that CS shock heating produced by ejecta–CSM interaction provides a better fit to the LCs of most of the events we examine. We discuss the possibility that collision of supernova ejecta with hydrogen-deficient CSM accounts for some of the hydrogen-deficient SLSNe (SLSN-I) and may be a plausible explanation for the explosion mechanism of SN 2007bi, the pair-instability supernova candidate. We characterize and discuss issues of parameter degeneracy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48612952a40abbb6c7c8ac72bd3b923c5274ed8c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Berger
2. B. Metzger
3. D. Kasen
4. Bing Zhang
5. B. Margalit
6. E. Quataert
7. S. Smartt
8. M. Nicholl

Citations in the corpus

• On the diversity of superluminous supernovae: ejected mass as the dominant factor (2015, methodology): “All of the light-curve fits by Nicholl et al. (2014, and many by Chatzopoulos et al. 2013) found ρCSM ∼ 10−12 g cm−3.”
• The Magnetar Model for Type I Superluminous Supernovae. I. Bayesian Analysis of the Full Multicolor Light-curve Sample with MOSFiT (2017, unknown): “It has been known for some time that this model can reproduce the rather diverse bolometric light curves of SLSNe (Chatzopoulos et al. 2013; Inserra et al. 2013; Nicholl et al. 2014, 2015b), including those with slow declines that have also been suggested to be nickel-powered explosions (Gal-Yam et…”
• The diversity of transients from magnetar birth in core collapse supernovae (2015, background): “Green points show the best-fit magnetar parameters for other SLSNe-I (Nicholl et al. 2014; Chatzopoulos et al. 2013), while red points show the fits from this paper for GRB111209A/SN2011kl, ASASSN-15lh, and Swift J2058+05.”
• Millisecond Magnetar Birth Connects FRB 121102 to Superluminous Supernovae and Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2017, background): “Model fits to SLSNe-I light curves generally find values of B14 ∼ 1−10 and P ∼ 3− 5 ms (e.g. Chatzopoulos et al. 2013; Nicholl et al. 2014).”
• Spectroscopy of superluminous supernova host galaxies. A preference of hydrogen-poor events for extreme emission line galaxies (2014, methodology): “All SLSNe-II studied here are scaled-up SNe-IIn and their extreme luminosity can be primarily attributed to circum-stellar material (CSM) interaction (e.g. Chatzopoulos et al. 2013; Moriya et al. 2013).”