435 citations · 791 across the 16 of their papers we have counts for
16 papers
Luminous Red Novae as shock-powered transients I: Electron-scattering wings and deviations from Case B
Albert Sneppen, Kenta Hotokezaka, Christopher M. Irwin
Luminous red novae (LRNe) are a class of optical transients resulting from the mergers of binary stars or common envelope events. The population displays heterogeneous light curves…
EP260321a/SN 2026gzf: The Faintest Shock Breakout Associated with a Broad-Lined Supernova
Brendan O'Connor, Xander J. Hall, Malte Busmann +33
The explosion of a star is first marked by the shock wave breaking out of the stellar surface, producing a burst of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. These events are observationall…
AT2018cow Powered by a Shock in Aspherical Circumstellar Media
Taya Govreen-Segal, Ehud Nakar, Kenta Hotokezaka +2
We present a quantitative model for the luminous fast blue optical transient AT2018cow in which a shock propagating through an aspherical circumstellar medium (CSM) produces the X-…
Black Hole Envelopes in Little Red Dots
Daisaburo Kido, Kunihito Ioka, Kenta Hotokezaka +2
Recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered a population of compact, red object () known as little red dots (LRDs). The presence of broa…
Revisiting GRB 060218: new insights into low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts from a revised shock breakout model
Christopher M. Irwin, Kenta Hotokezaka
Despite two decades since the discovery of low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts, their origin remains poorly understood. In events such as GRB 060218, shock breakout from a progenitor w…
Demystifying shock breakout spectra
Christopher M. Irwin, Kenta Hotokezaka
The spectrum of the first supernova light (i.e., the shock breakout and early cooling emission) is an important diagnostic for the state of the progenitor star just before explosio…
An unexplored regime of shock breakout with a distinct spectral signature
Christopher M. Irwin, Kenta Hotokezaka
The first light that escapes from a supernova explosion is the shock breakout emission, which produces a bright flash of UV or X-ray radiation. Standard theory predicts that the sh…
Dynamical properties of mildly relativistic ejecta produced by the mass-loading of gamma-ray burst jets in dense ambient media
Akihiro Suzuki, Christopher M. Irwin, Keiichi Maeda
We present the results of a series of 3D special relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) jet in a massive circumstellar medium (CSM) surrounding the progen…
Bolometric light curves of aspherical shock breakout
Christopher Irwin, Itai Linial, Ehud Nakar +2
The shock breakout emission is the first light that emerges from a supernova. In the spherical case it is characterized by a brief UV flash. In an axisymmetric, non-spherical prola…
Jet-driven bubbles in Fanaroff-Riley type I sources
Christopher M. Irwin, Xiaping Tang, Tsvi Piran +1
Observations of several Fanaroff-Riley (FR) type I sources reveal outflowing bipolar bubbles of hot gas surrounded by a weak forward shock. We consider the possibility that these b…
The propagation of choked jet outflows in power-law external media
Christopher M. Irwin, Ehud Nakar, Tsvi Piran
Observations of both gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) point to the idea that some relativistic jets are suffocated by their environment before we observe t…
Jet or Shock Breakout? The Low-Luminosity GRB 060218
C. M. Irwin, R. A. Chevalier
We consider a model for the low-luminosity gamma-ray burst GRB 060218 that plausibly accounts for multiwavelength observations to day 20. The model components are: (1) a long-lived…
Radio and X-ray observations of SN 2006jd: Another strongly interacting Type IIn supernova
Poonam Chandra, Roger A. Chevalier, Nikolai Chugai +5
We report four years of radio and X-ray monitoring of the Type IIn supernova SN 2006jd at radio wavelengths with the Very Large Array, Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope and Expanded…
Strong Evolution of X-Ray Absorption in the Type IIn Supernova SN 2010jl
Poonam Chandra, Roger A. Chevalier, Christopher M. Irwin +3
We report two epochs of Chandra-ACIS X-ray imaging spectroscopy of the nearby bright Type IIn supernova SN 2010jl, taken around 2 months and then a year after the explosion. The ma…
X-Rays from Supernova Shocks in Dense Mass Loss
Roger A. Chevalier, Christopher M. Irwin
Type IIn and related supernovae show evidence for an interaction with a dense circumstellar medium that produces most of the supernova luminosity. X-ray emission from shock heated…
Shock Breakout in Dense Mass Loss: Luminous Supernovae
Roger A. Chevalier, Christopher M. Irwin
We examine the case where a circumstellar medium around a supernova is sufficiently opaque that a radiation dominated shock propagates in the circumstellar region. The initial prop…