Related papers: Studying the Power Sources Behind Type Ic Supernov…
The lightcurve of the explosion of a star with a radius <10-100Rsun is powered mostly by radioactive decay. Observationally such events are dominated by hydrogen deficient progenitors and classified as Type I supernovae: white dwarf…
Type Ic supernovae represent the explosions of the most stripped massive stars, but their progenitors and explosion mechanisms remain unclear. Larger samples of observed supernovae can help characterize the population of these transients.…
A survey of Type II supernovae explosion models has been carried out to determine how their light curves and spectra vary with their mass, metallicity, and explosion energy. The presupernova models are taken from a recent survey of massive…
The interaction of supernova ejecta with a surrounding circumstellar medium (CSM) generates a strong shock which can convert the ejecta kinetic energy into observable radiation. Given the diversity of potential CSM structures (arising from…
Superluminous supernovae radiate up to 100 times more energy than normal supernovae. The origin of this energy and the nature of their stellar progenitors are poorly understood. We identify neutral iron lines in the spectrum of one such…
Recent all-sky surveys have led to the discovery of new types of transients. These include stars disrupted by the central supermassive black hole, and supernovae that are 10-100 times more energetic than typical ones. However, the nature of…
We examine the basic physics of type Ia supernova (SNe Ia) light curves with a view toward interpreting the relations between peak luminosity, peak width, and late-time slope in terms of the properties of the underlying explosion models. We…
The shape of the light curve peak of radioactive--powered core--collapse "stripped--envelope" supernovae constrains the ejecta mass, nickel mass, and kinetic energy by the brightness and diffusion time for a given opacity and observed…
The sources of the astrophysical neutrino flux discovered by IceCube are for the most part unresolved. Extragalactic core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) have been suggested as candidate multi-messenger sources. In interaction-powered…
Cosmic explosions dissipate energy into their surroundings on a very wide range of time-scales: producing shock waves and associated particle acceleration. The historical culprits for the acceleration of the bulk of Galactic cosmic rays are…
The thermalized energy from the radioactive decays of 56Ni and 57Ni and their daughter nuclides power the light curves of supernovae near maximum light. The bolometric light curve gives us a fundamental understanding of the energy evolution…
Observations from the last decade have indicated the existence of a general class of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), in which the peak luminosity exceeds 10^{44} erg/s. Here we focus on a subclass of these events, where the light curve is…
Unusually high velocities (< ~0.1c) and correspondingly high kinetic energies have been observed in a subset of Type Ic supernovae (so-called "broad-lined Ic" supernovae; SNe Ic-BL), prompting a search for a central engine model capable of…
Supernovae (SNe) are the most brilliant optical stellar-class explosions. Over the past two decades, several optical transient survey projects discovered more than $\sim 100$ so-called superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) whose peak…
Transients powered by interaction with the circumstellar medium (CSM) are often observed in wavelengths other than optical, and multi-wavelength modelling can be important when inferring the properties of the explosion and CSM, or for…
A number of astrophyical transients originating from stellar explosions are powered by the collision of the ejected material with the circumstellar medium, which efficiently produces thermal radiation via shock dissipation. We investigate…
The light curves of Type Ia Supernovae (SN Ia) are powered by gamma-rays emitted by the decay of radioactive elements such as $^{56}$Ni and its decay products. These gamma-rays are downscattered,absorbed, and eventually reprocessed into the…
The Type Ic supernovae are probably "nearly-nude" core collapse events. They are thus of special interest in terms of their evolutionary origin, but also as the source of potential clues to the explosion process that may not be obtained…
Motivated by recent models involving off-centre ignition of type Ia supernova explosions, we undertake three-dimensional time-dependent radiation transport simulations to investigate the range of bolometric light curve properties that could…
A long-lived central engine embedded in expanding supernova ejecta can alter the dynamics and observational signatures of the event, producing an unusually luminous, energetic, and/or rapidly-evolving transient. We use two-dimensional…