Light Curves from Supernova Shock Breakout through an Extended Wind

Abstract

Recent observations suggest that some supernovae may be the result of an explosion into an optically thick circumstellar material, the product of pre-explosion mass-loss (wind) by the progenitor star. This scenario has been studied previously both analytically and numerically. However, many previous studies base their analysis on the diffusion approximation for radiation transfer, which is inappropriate in the optically thin outer layers of the wind. Here we study the deviations from diffusion, and calculate light curves more accurately using a Monte Carlo approach to photon transfer. We distinguish between "compact" winds, for which the diffusion approximation is appropriate, and "extended" winds, which require a more delicate treatment of the radiation. We show that this effect is more significant than that of the light travel time difference to a distant observer, which has a secondary influence on the light curves of extended-wind systems. We also comment on the applicability of the widely used flux-limited diffusion approximation in this context: we find that it generally does not reproduce the Monte Carlo results. The flux-limited diffusion approximation leads to results which are not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively wrong, in the extended-wind regime.

Matched to published version

References in corpus (5)

• Analytical Light Curve Models of Super-Luminous Supernovae: chi^2-Minimizations of Parameter Fits
• A panchromatic view of the restless SN2009ip reveals the explosive ejection of a massive star envelope
• Light Curve Modeling of Superluminous Supernova 2006gy: Collision between Supernova Ejecta and Dense Circumstellar Medium
• SN 2009ip and SN 2010mc: Core-collapse Type IIn supernovae arising from blue supergiants
• An Analytic Bolometric Light Curve Model of Interaction-Powered Supernovae and its Application to Type IIn Supernovae

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Rapidly-Evolving and Luminous Transients from Pan-STARRS1
• An embedded X-ray source shines through the aspherical AT2018cow: revealing the inner workings of the most luminous fast-evolving optical transients
• Rapidly evolving transients in the Dark Energy Survey
• Rapidly Rising Transients in the Supernova - Superluminous Supernova Gap
• Cool and Luminous Transients from Mass-Losing Binary Stars
• Shock breakout theory
• Explosions Driven by the Coalescence of a Compact Object with the Core of a Massive-Star Companion Inside a Common Envelope: Circumstellar Properties, Light Curves, and Population Statistics
• Interaction-powered supernovae: Rise-time vs. peak-luminosity correlation and the shock-breakout velocity
• Signatures of Circumstellar Interaction in the Unusual Transient AT2018cow
• Numerical Modeling of the Early Light Curves of Type IIP Supernovae
• The detection rate of early UV emission from supernovae: A dedicated GALEX/PTF survey and calibrated theoretical estimates
• uGMRT observations of a Fast and Blue Optical Transient -- AT 2018cow
• Physical Properties of UDF12 Galaxies in Cosmological simulations
• Nebular line emission from z > 7 galaxies in cosmological simulations: rest-frame UV to Optical lines
• The Dust in M31
• Analytic Light Curves of Dense CSM Shock Breakout and Cooling
• 2D radiaition-hydrodynamic simulations of supernova shock breakout in bipolar explosions of a blue supergiant progenitor
• Supernova PTF12glz: a possible shock breakout driven through an aspherical wind
• Hydrodynamical interaction of mildly relativistic ejecta with an ambient medium
• Dynamics and observational signatures of core-collapse supernovae with central engines: hydrodynamics simulations with Monte Carlo post-processing
• An unexplored regime of shock breakout with a distinct spectral signature
• A Fast-Evolving, Luminous Transient Discovered by K2/Kepler
• Science with a large field-of-view polarization survey: The Large Array Survey Telescope Polarization Node (LAST-P)