A simple approach to the supernova progenitor–explosion connection

By Bernhard Müller, Alexander Heger, D. Liptai, J. Cameron, Queen's University of Belfast, M. University, U. Minnesota, JINA-CEE University of Notre Dame, S. University. 2016

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new approach to understand the landscape of supernova explosion energies, ejected nickel masses, and neutron star birth masses. In contrast to other recent parametric approaches, our model predicts the properties of neutrino-driven explosions based on the pre-collapse stellar structure without the need for hydrodynamic simulations. The model is based on physically motivated scaling laws and simple differential equations describing the shock propagation, the contraction of the neutron star, the neutrino emission, the heating conditions, and the explosion energetics. Using model parameters compatible with multi-D simulations and a fine grid of thousands of supernova progenitors, we obtain a variegated landscape of neutron star and black hole formation similar to other parameterised approaches and find good agreement with semi-empirical measures for the "explodability" of massive stars. Our predicted explosion properties largely conform to observed correlations between the nickel mass and explosion energy. Accounting for the coexistence of outflows and downflows during the explosion phase, we naturally obtain a positive correlation between explosion energy and ejecta mass. These correlations are relatively robust against parameter variations, but our results suggest that there is considerable leeway in parametric models to widen or narrow the mass ranges for black hole and neutron star formation and to scale explosion energies up or down. Our model is currently limited to an all-or-nothing treatment of fallback and there remain some minor discrepancies between model predictions and observational constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce3f8fd831625b186b36ed2198fafb4eefb20e55

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Citations in the corpus

The Status of Multi-Dimensional Core-Collapse Supernova Models (2016, methodology): “Whether 3D initial conditions generally play an important role in the neutrino-driven mechanism cannot be answered by studying just two progenitors, aside from the fact that the models of Couch et al. (2015) and Müller et al. (2016a) still suffer from limitations.”
Three-dimensional simulations of neutrino-driven core-collapse supernovae from low-mass single and binary star progenitors (2018, methodology): “(7) Since it can be argued that Eexpl ∝ Mej (Janka 2017), and since supernova explosion energies vary considerably more than neutron star masses, this would imply vkick ∝ αejEexpl.”
Neutron Star Kicks by the Gravitational Tug-boat Mechanism in Asymmetric Supernova Explosions: Progenitor and Explosion Dependence (2016, methodology): “Similarly, there is an approximately linear relation between the SN explosion energy and the ejected 56Ni mass (see figure 17 in Sukhbold et al. 2016 and, for the iron-group mass as a proxy of the 56Ni mass, figure 10 in Müller et al. 2016a).”
A High-resolution Study of Presupernova Core Structure (2017, methodology): “The “N20” engine parameterization was used to make the comparison with Ertl et al. (2016) and the “standard” choices of five parameters were used for Müller et al. (2016) method.”