THE REMARKABLE DEATHS OF 9–11 SOLAR MASS STARS

By Stan Woosley, Alexander Heger. 2015

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The post-helium-burning evolution of stars from 7 M ⊙ ?> to 11 M ⊙ ?> is complicated by the lingering effects of degeneracy and off-center ignition. Here, stars in this mass range are studied using a standard set of stellar physics. Two important aspects of the study are the direct coupling of a reaction network of roughly 220 nuclei to the structure calculation at all stages and the use of a subgrid model to describe the convective bounded flame that develops during neon and oxygen burning. Below 9.0 M ⊙ ?> degenerate oxygen–neon cores form that may become either white dwarfs or electron-capture supernovae. Above 10.3 M ⊙ ?> the evolution proceeds “normally” to iron-core collapse, without composition inversions or degenerate flashes. Emphasis here is upon the stars in between, which typically ignite oxygen burning off-center. After oxygen burns in a convectively bounded flame, silicon burning ignites in a degenerate flash that commences closer to the stellar center and with increasing violence for stars of larger mass. In some cases the silicon flash is so violent that it could lead to the early ejection of the hydrogen envelope. This might have interesting observable consequences. For example, the death of a 10.0 M ⊙ ?> star could produce two supernova-like displays, a faint low-energy event due to the silicon flash, and an unusually bright supernova many months later as the low-energy ejecta from core collapse collides with the previously ejected envelope. The potential relation to the Crab supernova is discussed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae15c76d0424f2ac8d90ce7eb58074f126c07698

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Citations in the corpus

New white dwarf and subdwarf stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 (2015, background): “White dwarf stars are the end product of evolution of all stars with progenitor masses below 7–10.6 M⊙, depending on metallicity (e.g Ibeling & Heger 2013; Doherty et al. 2015; Woosley & Heger 2015), which corresponds to over 97% of the total number of stars.”
Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, background): “…in detail in Podsiadlowski et al. (2004); Poelarends et al. (2008); Takahashi et al. (2013); Jones et al. (2013, 2014); Doherty et al. (2015); Woosley & Heger (2015); Jones et al. (2016); Radice et al. (2017), the ZAMS mass range of isolated stars producing EC SNe is restricted to a narrow…”
Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, background): “The secondary (initially least massive) star may, in principle, be a 5 − 7 M star which accretes mass from the primary (initially most massive) star to reach the threshold limit for core collapse at ∼ 8 − 12 M (Jones et al. 2013; Woosley & Heger 2015).”
A High-resolution Study of Presupernova Core Structure (2017, background): “An exception is the treatment of oxygen and silicon burning in stars lighter than about 11 M (Woosley & Heger 2015).”
The Status of Multi-Dimensional Core-Collapse Supernova Models (2016, methodology): “…is beset with many uncertainties (Siess 2007; Poelarends et al. 2008; Jones et al. 2013, 2014, 2016a; Doherty et al. 2015; Schwab et al. 2015; Woosley & Heger 2015b), recent studies of stellar evolution in the mass range around 9M have demonstrated that there is a variety of paths towards…”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: a tale of two elements - chemical evolution of magnesium and europium (2017, background): “The assumed lower mass limit for corecollapse supernovae in IllustrisTNG is 8 M , a generous lower limit for the progenitors of a SNII (Smartt 2009; Ibeling & Heger 2013; Woosley & Heger 2015; Sukhbold et al. 2016).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “Although the minimum mass for core collapse supernovae is not known precisely, it is typically thought to be roughly 8 M or slightly higher (Smartt 2009; Ibeling & Heger 2013; Woosley & Heger 2015), making this update important.”
CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE FROM 9 TO 120 SOLAR MASSES BASED ON NEUTRINO-POWERED EXPLOSIONS (2015, methodology): “Qualitatively, the models reflect four partitions of expected behavior (e.g., Woosley & Heger 2015): 1.”
A simple approach to the supernova progenitor–explosion connection (2016, methodology): “The resulting mass accretion rate ˙ M is given by (Woosley & Heger 2015a), where ρ is the initial density of a given mass shell prior to collapse.”
Pulsational Pair-instability Supernovae (2016, background): “A first generation of such stars might thus contribute a composition rich in either CO or CNO, with a trace of neon and magnesium and very little silicon and iron (Woosley & Heger 2015a).”
Pre-supernova outbursts via wave heating in massive stars – I. Red supergiants (2017, background): “Woosley & Heger (2015) showed that degenerate Si-burning flashes in 10 M stars could produce shock waves that eject part of the stellar envelope, which may MNRAS 470, 1642–1656 (2017) account for some fraction of IIn SNe.”
Unifying Type II Supernova Light Curves with Dense Circumstellar Material (2016, methodology): “We use non-rotating solar-metallicity RSG models from the stellar evolution code KEPLER (Weaver et al. 1978; Woosley & Heger 2007, 2015; Sukhbold & Woosley 2014; Sukhbold et al. 2016) with ZAMS masses in the range between 9M and 16.5M .”
Measuring the Progenitor Masses and Dense Circumstellar Material of Type II Supernovae (2017, methodology): “As in our previous work (Morozova et al. 2017), we use the non-rotating solar-metallicity RSG models from the stellar evolution code KEPLER (Weaver et al. 1978; Woosley & Heger 2007, 2015; Sukhbold & Woosley 2014; Sukhbold et al. 2016).”