Related papers: Finding Supernova Ia Progenitors with the Chandra …
A key question for supernova cosmology is whether the peak luminosities of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are sufficiently free from the effects of cosmic and galactic evolution. To answer this question, we review the currently popular…
Type Ia supernovae, critical for studying cosmic expansion, arise from thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs, but their precise progenitor pathways remain unclear. Growing evidence supports the ``double-degenerate'' scenario, where two…
The association of a supernova with a gamma-ray burst (GRB 030329) implies a massive star progenitor, which is expected to have an environment formed by pre-burst stellar winds. Although some sources are consistent with the expected wind…
The classic example of a Type IIb supernova is SN 1993J, which had a cool extended progenitor surrounded by a dense wind. There is evidence for another category of Type IIb supernova which has a more compact progenitor with a lower density,…
Motivated by recent results in stellar evolution that predict the existence of hybrid white dwarf (WD) stars with a C-O core inside an O-Ne shell, we simulate thermonuclear (Type Ia) supernovae from these hybrid progenitors. We use the…
All types of supernovae (SNe), except Type Ia, have been observed to interact with their immediate circumstellar medium (CSM). This interaction can reveal their progenitor's histories, and constrain our ideas about the evolution of massive…
Stellar evolution theory predicts multiple pathways to the explosive deaths of stars as supernovae. Locating and characterizing the progenitors of well-studied supernovae is important to constrain the theory, and to justify and design…
The progenitor problem of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is still unsolved. Most of these events are thought to be explosions of carbon-oxygen (CO) white dwarfs (WDs), but for many of the explosion scenarios, particularly those involving the…
We revise the theoretical initial mass-final luminosity relation for progenitors of type IIP and IIL supernovae. The effects of the major uncertainties, as those due to the treatment of convection, semiconvection, rotation, mass loss,…
When the ejecta of supernovae interact with the progenitor star's circumstellar environment, a strong shock is driven back into the ejecta, causing the material to become bright optically and in X-rays. Most notably, as the shock traverses…
In spite of their importance as standard candles in cosmology and as major major sites of nucleosynthesis in the Universe, what kinds of progenitor systems lead to type Ia supernovae (SN) remains a subject of considerable debate in the…
Close binaries consisting of a main sequence star and a white dwarf are considered as candidates for Type~Ia supernova progenitors. We present selfconsistent calculations of the time dependence of the structure of the main sequence star,…
Justham (2011) and DiStefano et al.\ (2011) proposed that the white-dwarf progenitor of a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) may have to spin down before it can explode. As the white dwarf spin-down timescale is not well known theoretically, we here…
It is now firmly established that at a significant fraction of hydrogen-rich type II supernovae (SNe II) arise from red supergiant progenitors. However, a large diversity of SN properties exist, and it is presently unclear how this can be…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) play important roles in our study of the expansion and acceleration of the Universe, but because we do not know the exact nature or natures of the progenitors, there is a systematic uncertainty that must be…
The early lightcurves of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) can be used to test predictions about their progenitor systems. If the progenitor system consists of a single white dwarf in a binary with a Roche-lobe-overflowing non-degenerate stellar…
The death of massive stars produces a variety of supernovae, which are linked to the structure of the exploding stars. The detection of several precursor stars of Type II supernovae have been reported, however we do not yet have direct…
One method of discriminating between the many Type Ia progenitor scenarios is by searching for contaminating hydrogen and helium stripped from the companion star. We present several high-resolution 2-D numerical simulations of the impact of…
We present constraints on core-collapse supernova progenitors through observations of their environments within host galaxies. This is achieved through 2 routes. Firstly, we investigate the spatial correlation of supernovae with host galaxy…
We explore properties of Type Ib and IIb SN progenitors that are produced by stable mass transfer in binary systems, using a new grid of stellar evolution models from an initial primary mass in the range of 10 - 18 $\mathrm{M_\odot}$ at…