Surrogate models for lightcurves and photosphere properties of Type II supernovae

Abstract

Inferences on the properties Type II supernovae (SNe) can provide significant insights into the lives and deaths of the astrophysical population of massive stars and potentially provide measurements of luminosity distance, independent of the distance ladder. Here, we introduce surrogate models for the photospheric properties and lightcurves of Type II SNe trained on a large grid of simulations from the radiation hydrodynamics code, {\sc stella}. The trained model can accurately and efficiently ($\sim 30$ms) predict the lightcurves and properties of Type II SNe within a large parameter space of progenitor ($10-18M_{\odot }$ at ZAMS) and nickel masses ($0.001-0.3M_{\odot }$), progenitor mass-loss rate ($10^{-5}-10^{-1}{M}_{\odot }$yr${}^{-1}$), CSM radius ($1-10\times 10^{14}$cm), and SN explosion energies ($0.5-5\times 10^{51}$erg). We validate this model through inference on lightcurves and photosphere properties drawn directly from the original {\sc stella} simulations not included in training. In particular, for a synthetic Type II SNe observed within the 10-year LSST survey, we find we can measure the progenitor and nickel masses with $\approx 9\%$ and $\approx 25\%$ precision, respectively, when fitting the photometric data while accounting for the uncertainty in the surrogate model itself. Meanwhile, from real observations of SN~2004et, SN~2012aw, and SN~2017gmr we infer a progenitor ZAMS mass of $12.15_{-1.06}^{+1.03}{M}_{\odot }$, $10.61_{-0.32}^{+0.37}{M}_{\odot }$, $10.4\pm 0.3M_{\odot }$, respectively. We discuss systematic uncertainties from our surrogate modelling approach and likelihood approaches to account for these uncertainties. We further discuss future extensions to the model to enable stronger constraints on properties of Type II SNe and their progenitors, and applications of our surrogate modelling approach to other transients.

Accepted in MNRAS. 11 pages, 10 figures. Models available at https://github.com/nikhil-sarin/redback_surrogates

References in corpus (17)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• Theory of Core-Collapse Supernovae
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler
• Theoretical light curves for deflagration models of Type Ia supernova
• Photometric and spectroscopic evolution of the type IIP supernova SN 2004et
• A large fraction of hydrogen-rich supernova progenitors experience elevated mass loss shortly prior to explosion
• The Initial Masses of the Red Supergiant Progenitors to Type-II Supernovae
• Inferring Explosion Properties from Type II-Plateau Supernova Light Curves
• A Global Model of The Light Curves and Expansion Velocities of Type II-Plateau Supernovae
• Redback: A Bayesian inference software package for electromagnetic transients
• Type II supernovae from the Carnegie Supernova Project-I. III. Understanding SN II diversity through correlations between physical and observed properties
• Synthetic red supergiant explosion model grid for systematic characterization of Type II supernovae
• Supernova 2017eaw: molecule and dust formation from infrared observations
• The Iron Yield of Normal Type II Supernovae
• Inferencing Progenitor and Explosion Properties of Evolving Core-collapse Supernovae from Zwicky Transient Facility Light Curves
• Enormous explosion energy of Type IIP SN 2017gmr with bipolar Ni-56 ejecta
• Probabilistic Dalek -- Emulator framework with probabilistic prediction for supernova tomography