paper

Are stripped envelope supernovae really deficient in Ni?

arXiv:2109.00603 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac2306

Abstract

Recent works have indicated that the Ni masses estimated for Stripped Envelope SNe (SESNe) are systematically higher than those estimated for SNe II. Although this may suggest a distinct progenitor structure between these types of SNe, the possibility remains that this may be caused by observational bias. One important possible bias is that SESNe with low Ni mass are dim, and therefore they are more likely to escape detection. By investigating the distributions of the Ni mass and distance for the samples collected from the literature, we find that the current literature SESN sample indeed suffers from a significant observational bias, i.e., objects with low Ni mass - if they exist - will be missed, especially at larger distances. Note, however, that those distant objects in our sample are mostly SNe Ic-BL. We also conducted mock observations assuming that the Ni mass distribution for SESNe is intrinsically the same with that for SNe II. We find that the Ni mass distribution of the detected SESNe samples moves toward higher mass than the assumed intrinsic distribution, because of the difficulty in detecting the low-Ni mass SESNe. These results could explain the general trend of the higher Ni mass distribution (than SNe II) of SESNe found thus far in the literature. However, further finding clear examples of low-Ni mass SESNe () is required to add weight to this hypothesis. Also, the objects with high Ni mass () are not explained by our model, which may require an additional explanation.

arXiv comment19 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

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