Related papers: Properties of Thorne-Zytkow object explosions
The assembly of supermassive black holes poses a challenge primarily because of observed quasars at high redshift, but additionally because of the current lack of observations of intermediate mass black holes. One plausible scenario for…
When a binary star system is tidally disrupted by a supermassive black hole at a galactic nucleus, one star is ejected at a high speed while the other remains in a tightly bound orbit around the black hole. The cluster of tightly bound…
(abridged) We have investigated the physical conditions under which accreting neutron stars can both produce and preserve sufficient quantities of carbon fuel to trigger superbursts. Our models span the plausible ranges of neutron star…
Neutron stars are some of the densest manifestations of massive objects in the universe. They are ideal astrophysical laboratories for testing theories of dense matter physics and provide connections among nuclear physics, particle physics…
Accretion disks around active galactic nuclei are potentially unstable to star formation at large radii. We note that when the compact objects formed from some of these stars spiral into the central supermassive black hole, there is no…
Neutrinos from core collapse supernovae can be emitted from a rapidly accreting disk surrounding a black hole, instead of the canonical proto-neutron star. For Galactic events, detector count rates are considerable and in fact can be in the…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are manifestations of stars deficient of hydrogen and helium disrupting in a thermonuclear runaway. While explosions of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs are thought to account for the majority of events, part of the…
We demonstrate that resonant shattering flares can occur during close passages of neutron stars in eccentric or hyperbolic encounters. We provide updated estimates for the rate of close encounters of compact objects in dense stellar…
We suggest that a neutron star with a strong magnetic field, spiraling into the envelope of a companion star, can generate a ``companion induced SN-like off-center explosion". The strongly magnetized neutron star ("magnetar") is born in a…
Astronomers have discovered many candidate black holes in X-ray binaries and in the nuclei of galaxies. The candidate objects are too massive to be neutron stars, and for this reason they are considered to be black holes. While the evidence…
The mode of explosive burning in Type Ia SNe remains an outstanding problem. It is generally thought to begin as a subsonic deflagration, but this may transition into a supersonic detonation (the DDT). We argue that this transition leads to…
A bright flare from a galactic nucleus followed at late times by a $t^{-5/3}$ decay in luminosity is often considered the signature of the complete tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole. The flare and power-law decay are…
The observation of neutrinos from Supernova~1987A has confirmed the theoretical conjecture that these particles play a crucial role during the collapse of the core of a massive star. Only one per cent of the energy they carry away from the…
It has been hypothesized recently that core collapse supernovae are triggered by mildly relativistic jets following observations of radio properties of these explosions. Association of a jet, similar to a gamma-ray burst jet but only…
Accretion disks with masses ~0.001-0.1 Msun form during the merger of neutron star (NS)-NS and black hole-NS binaries. Initially, such hyper-accreting disks cool efficiently by neutrino emission and their composition is driven neutron-rich…
Quark-novae leave behind quark stars with a surrounding metal-rich fall-back (ring-like) material. These compact remnants have high magnetic fields and are misconstrued as magnetars; however, several observational features allow us to…
As an explosion develops in the collapsed core of a massive star, neutrino emission drives convection in a hot bubble of radiation, nucleons, and pairs just outside a proto-neutron star. Shortly thereafter, neutrinos drive a wind-like…
The birth properties of neutron stars yield important information on the still debated physical processes that trigger the explosion and on intrinsic neutron-star physics. These properties include the high space velocities of young neutron…
Though it is agreed that the post-bounce, pre-explosion cores of massive stars are unstable to transonic, Rayleigh-Taylor-like instabilities, the role convective motions may play in igniting the supernova explosion itself is not yet clear.…
Wide-field optical surveys have begun to uncover large samples of fast (t_rise < 5d), luminous (M_peak < -18), blue transients. While commonly attributed to the breakout of a supernova shock into a dense wind, the great distances to the…