Magnetars: The Perpetrators of (Nearly) Everything
Extreme transient events are pushing the limits of our standard explosion models, but magnetars may save the day.
Extreme transient events are pushing the limits of our standard explosion models, but magnetars may save the day.
A supernova goes off. A star has died. Can its partner have anything to do with it?
In this paper the authors present simulations of a model to explain rapidly-fading supernovae, a class of transients whose lightcurves decline quickly without substantial radioactive tails. They posits a standard core-collapse explosion of a standard Type Ib/Ic supernova progenitor, but one that produces very little radioactivity and instead exhibits a light curve governed by oxygen recombination.
The authors discuss the possibility that the strangely-shaped supernova remnant W49B was created by a core-collapse supernova that formed strong bipolar jets instead of a spherical shockwave.
The neutrino reheating mechanism works out in theory to trigger core-collapse supernovae, but we’ve had a lot of trouble getting it to work in 3-dimensional simulations. Because of the prohibitive computational expense, really accurate neutrino physics have thus far only been implemented in 2D. This paper seeks to investigate whether there are systematic differences in fluid behavior between 2D and 3D models in order to figure out whether a 2D model can really stand in for a 3D one.