Burst Neutrinos from Nitrogen Flash

Abstract

Neutrinos give a novel probe to explore deep interior of astrophysical objects, which otherwise is not accessible with optical observations; among notable examples are solar and supernova neutrinos. We show that there is a new class of strong neutrino emission from helium burning, N + alpha --> 18F gamma followed by beta decay 18F --> 18O + e+ + nu_e, that gives a maximum neutrino luminosity of 10^8 times the solar bolometric luminosity at the helium-core flash of a 1 M_sun star, whereas the flash is not observable by optical means. This means that the neutrino flux, of average energy of 0.382 MeV, will be 10% the solar CNO neutrino flux on Earth if the star is located at 10pc.

Accepted to ApJ Letters. Replaced version with extended discussion. Some additional references added

References in corpus (3)

• New solar opacities, abundances, helioseismology, and neutrino fluxes
• Red Giant Branch stars: the theoretical framework
• New evolutionary models for massive ZZ Ceti stars: I. First results for their pulsational properties

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Unstable Helium Shell Burning on Accreting White Dwarfs
• Acoustic Signatures of the Helium Core Flash
• Helium White Dwarfs in Cataclysmic Variables
• On Stellar Evolution In A Neutrino Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram
• On The Impact Of 22Ne On The Pulsation Periods Of Carbon-Oxygen White Dwarfs With Helium Dominated Atmospheres
• Stellar Neutrino Emission Across The Mass-Metallicity Plane
• Life Products of Stars
• Neutrinos and Asteroseismology of Stars over the Helium Flash
• Neutrinos from stars in the Milky Way
• Detection horizon for the neutrino burst from the stellar helium flash