Cosmic Explosions Under a Blanket
Chelsea Axen, University of California, Berkeley
Stars explode, unbinding all or most of their mass, in an event called a supernova (SN). Sometimes supernovae occur in an environment that is blanketed by gas (“circumstellar mass” or “CSM”) due to previous mass loss episodes, either from the star itself or its binary companion star (if it has one). We see evidence for this in SN light curves and spectra. To analyze the degeneracies that exist between the CSM properties and the resulting signatures in the data, we are creating a large (probably thousands, perhaps tens of thousands) grid of one-dimensional hydrodynamical models of the interaction and then post-processing these models with a radiation transport code. The goal is to be able to stride confidently from a spectrum or light curve to a CSM mass estimate, and to understand what configurations will not result in a signal (e.g., thin shells).
Abstract Author(s): Chelsea Harris, Peter Nugent, Daniel Kasen