Aspherical Core-Collapse Supernovae in Red Supergiants Powered by Nonrelativistic Jets

TL;DR

This study simulates jet-driven supernova explosions in red supergiants to understand how jet properties influence supernova asymmetry, spectral features, and shock breakout signals, aligning with observational data.

Contribution

It introduces models of jet-driven supernovae with varying jet characteristics, revealing how thermal versus kinetic energy dominance affects explosion symmetry and observational signatures.

Findings

Thermal energy-dominated jets produce more spherical large-scale ejecta.

Kinetic energy-dominated jets lead to early observable asymmetries.

Models match observed spectral line substructures and polarization data.

Abstract

We explore the observational characteristics of jet-driven supernovae by simulating bipolar-jet-driven explosions in a red supergiant progenitor. We present results of four models in which we hold the injected kinetic energy at a constant $10^{51}$ ergs across all jet models but vary the specific characteristics of the jets to explore the influence of the nature of jets on the structure of the supernova ejecta. We evolve the explosions past shock-breakout and into quasi-homologous expansion of the supernova envelope into a red supergiant wind. The oppositely-directed, nickel-rich jets give a large-scale asymmetry that may account for the non-spherical excitation and substructure of spectral lines such as H$\alpha$ and He I 10830\AA. Jets with a large fraction of kinetic to thermal energy punch through the progenitor envelope and give rise to explosions that would be observed to be asymmetric from the earliest epochs, inconsistent with spectropolarimetric measurements of Type II supernovae. Jets with higher thermal energy fractions result in explosions that are roughly spherical at large radii but are significantly elongated at smaller radii, deep inside the ejecta, in agreement with the polarimetric observations. We present shock breakout light curves that indicate that strongly aspherical shock breakouts are incompatible with recent {\it GALEX} observations of shock breakout from red supergiant stars. Comparison with observations indicates that jets must deposit their kinetic energy efficiently throughout the ejecta while in the hydrogen envelope. Thermal energy-dominated jets satisfy this criterion and yield many of the observational characteristics of Type II supernovae.