Massive Stellar Mergers as Precursors of Hydrogen-rich Pulsational Pair Instability Supernovae

Abstract

Interactions between massive stars in binaries are thought to be responsible for much of the observed diversity of supernovae. As surveys probe rarer populations of events, we should expect to see supernovae arising from increasingly uncommon progenitor channels. Here we examine a scenario in which massive stars merge after they have both formed a hydrogen-exhausted core. We suggest this could produce stars which explode as pair-instability supernovae (PISNe) with significantly more hydrogen, at a given metallicity, than in single-star models with the same pre-explosion oxygen-rich core mass. We investigate the subset of those stellar mergers which later produce pulsational PISNe, and estimate that the rate of such post-merger, hydrogen-rich pulsational PISNe could approach a few in a thousand of all core-collapse supernovae. The nature and predicted rate of such hydrogen-rich pulsational PISNe are reminiscent of the very unusual supernova iPTF14hls. For plausible assumptions, PISNe from similar mergers might dominate the rate of PISNe in the local Universe.

9 pages, 4 figures. Minor edits in text. Accepted for publication in ApJL

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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• The Stellar Merger Scenario for Black Holes in the Pair-instability Gap
• An extremely energetic supernova from a very massive star in a dense medium
• Formation of black holes in the pair-instability mass gap: evolution of a post-collision star
• Pre-supernova evolution and final fate of stellar mergers and accretors of binary mass transfer
• Simulating the formation of $\eta$ Carinae's surrounding nebula through unstable triple evolution and stellar merger-induced eruption
• The role of jets in exploding supernovae and in shaping their remnants
• Evolution of massive stellar triples and implications for compact object binary formation
• Formation of black holes in the pair-instability mass gap: Hydrodynamical simulations of a head-on massive star collision
• Reverse Algols and hydrogen-rich Wolf-Rayet stars from very massive binaries
• Euclid detectability of pair instability supernovae in binary population synthesis models consistent with merging binary black holes
• SN 1961V: A Pulsational Pair-Instability Supernova
• Whispering in the dark: Faint X-ray emission from black holes with OB star companions
• Supernovae from stellar mergers and accretors of binary mass transfer: Implications for Type IIP, 1987A-like and interacting supernovae
• Evolutionary models for the Very Massive Stars in the R136 cluster of 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Cosmic Radioactivity and Galactic Chemical Evolution