The Biggest Explosions in the Universe

Abstract

Supermassive primordial stars are expected to form in a small fraction of massive protogalaxies in the early universe, and are generally conceived of as the progenitors of the seeds of supermassive black holes (BHs). Supermassive stars with masses of ~55,000 M_Sun, however, have been found to explode and completely disrupt in a supernova (SN) with an energy of up to ~10^55 erg instead of collapsing to a BH. Such events, ~10,000 times more energetic than typical SNe today, would be among the biggest explosions in the history of the universe. Here we present a simulation of such a SN in two stages. Using the RAGE radiation hydrodynamics code we first evolve the explosion from an early stage through the breakout of the shock from the surface of the star until the blast wave has propagated out to several parsecs from the explosion site, which lies deep within an atomic cooling dark matter (DM) halo at z ~ 15. Then, using the GADGET cosmological hydrodynamics code we evolve the explosion out to several kiloparsecs from the explosion site, far into the low-density intergalactic medium. The host DM halo, with a total mass of 4 x 10^7 M_Sun, much more massive than typical primordial star-forming halos, is completely evacuated of high density gas after < 10 Myr, although dense metal-enriched gas recollapses into the halo, where it will likely form second-generation stars with metallicities of ~ 0.05 Z_Sun after > 70 Myr. The chemical signature of supermassive star explosions may be found in such long-lived second-generation stars today.

9 pages, 7 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ; a short movie of the explosion can be found at http://www.as.utexas.edu/~jljohnson/SMS_SN.mp4

References in corpus (37)

• A luminous quasar at a redshift of z = 7.085
• Formation of Supermassive Black Holes by Direct Collapse in Pregalactic Halos
• Nucleosynthetic signatures of the first stars
• Supermassive black hole formation during the assembly of pre-galactic discs
• Protostar Formation in the Early Universe
• The Formation of Population III Binaries from Cosmological Initial Conditions
• Fragmentation of star-forming clouds enriched with the first dust
• Accretion onto the First Stellar Mass Black Holes
• Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. III. Feedback from the First Stars
• Fluctuations in the High-Redshift Lyman-Werner Background: Close Halo Pairs as the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes
• Can Supermassive Black Holes Form in Metal-Enriched High-Redshift Protogalaxies ?
• The Formation of the First Stars II. Radiative Feedback Processes and Implications for the Initial Mass Function
• The First Galaxies: Assembly, Cooling and the Onset of Turbulence
• Population III star formation in a Lambda CDM universe, II: Effects of a photodissociating background
• Black hole formation in the early universe
• Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. II. Central Gravitational Collapse
• Quasars at z=6: the survival of the fittest
• The Destruction of Cosmological Minihalos by Primordial Supernovae
• Suppression of H_2 Cooling in the Ultraviolet Background
• The HII Region of a Primordial Star
• The chemistry of population III supernova ejecta: II - The nucleation of molecular clusters as a diagnostic for dust in the early universe
• Uncovering the Chemical Signature of the First Stars in the Universe
• Unravelling obese black holes in the first galaxies
• How Very Massive Metal Free Stars Start Cosmological Reionization
• Supermassive Black Hole Formation at High Redshifts via Direct Collapse: Physical Processes in the Early Stage
• The First Galaxies: Assembly of Disks and Prospects for Direct Detection
• The Transition from the First Stars to the Second Stars in the Early Universe
• Star Formation in the First Galaxies - II: Clustered Star Formation and the Influence of Metal Line Cooling
• The influence of magnetic fields, turbulence, and UV radiation on the formation of supermassive black holes
• Detectability of the First Cosmic Explosions
• The Biggest Explosions in the Universe
• The Burst Mode of Accretion in Primordial Protostars
• Primordial massive supernovae as the first molecular factories in the early universe
• Low-mass star formation triggered by early supernova explosions
• Pulsational instability of supergiant protostars: Do they grow supermassive by accretion?
• Illuminating the Primeval Universe with Type IIn Supernovae
• Evolution of the First Supernovae in Protogalaxies: Dynamics of Mixing of Heavy Elements

Cited by in corpus (35)

• Near-Field Cosmology with Metal-Poor Stars
• Formation of Primordial Supermassive Stars by Rapid Mass Accretion
• Chemodynamical history of the Galactic Bulge
• Titans of the Early Universe: The Prato Statement on the Origin of the First Supermassive Black Holes
• The formation of massive black holes in z~30 dark matter haloes with large baryonic streaming velocities
• Formation and Coalescence of Cosmological Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Supermassive Star Collapse
• Two-Dimensional Simulations of Pulsational Pair-Instability Supernovae
• General Relativistic Instability Supernova of a Supermassive Population III Star
• Pair Instability Supernovae of Very Massive Population III Stars
• The Early Growth of the First Black Holes
• Finding the First Cosmic Explosions. III. Pulsational Pair-Instability Supernovae
• Detectability of the First Cosmic Explosions
• Probing the stellar initial mass function with high-$z$ supernovae
• The Biggest Explosions in the Universe
• The impact of reionization on the formation of supermassive black hole seeds
• Can direct collapse black holes launch gamma-ray bursts and grow to supermassive black holes?
• The Biggest Explosions in the Universe. II
• Pair-Instability Supernovae in the Local Universe
• The First Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Universe
• Modeling Supermassive Primordial Stars with MESA
• Stability analysis of supermassive primordial stars: a new mass range for general relativistic instability supernovae
• On the Evolution of Supermassive Primordial Stars in Cosmological Flows
• On the Detection of Supermassive Primordial Stars
• Robust PCA and MIC statistics of baryons in early mini-haloes
• Finding Direct-Collapse Black Holes at Birth
• Population III Hypernovae
• Finding the First Cosmic Explosions. IV. 90 - 140 M${}_{\odot }$ Pair-Instability Supernovae
• Circular polarization of the CMB: Foregrounds and detection prospects
• On the Detection of Supermassive Primordial Stars. II. Blue Supergiants
• Detecting strongly lensed supernovae at z ~ 5-7 with LSST
• Jet-powered supernovae of $\sim 10^5{M}_{\odot }$ population III stars are observable by $Euclid$, $WFIRST$, $WISH$, and $JWST$
• Observational properties of a general relativistic instability supernova from a primordial supermassive star
• How much radioactive nickel does ASASSN-15lh require?
• Evolution and explosions of metal enriched supermassive stars: proton rich general relativistic instability supernovae
• Supernova explosions in magnetized, primordial dark matter halos