Mechanisms of Core-Collapse Supernovae & Simulation Results from the CHIMERA Code

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current understanding of core-collapse supernova mechanisms, focusing on neutrino heating, and presents simulation results from the CHIMERA code demonstrating successful explosions in 2D and ongoing work in 3D.

Contribution

It introduces the CHIMERA supernova simulation code and provides new 2D simulation results showing explosions across multiple progenitor masses.

Findings

All simulated progenitors in 2D exhibited explosions.

Shock waves expanded to 5,000-10,000 km in simulations.

Ongoing 3D simulation from a 15 solar mass progenitor.

Abstract

Unraveling the mechanism for core-collapse supernova explosions is an outstanding computational challenge and the problem remains essentially unsolved despite more than four decades of effort. However, much progress in realistic modeling has occurred recently through the availability of multi-teraflop machines and the increasing sophistication of supernova codes. These improvements have led to some key insights which may clarify the picture in the not too distant future. Here we briefly review the current status of the three explosion mechanisms (acoustic, MHD, and neutrino heating) that are currently under active investigation, concentrating on the neutrino heating mechanism as the one most likely responsible for producing explosions from progenitors in the mass range ~10 to ~25 solar masses. We then briefly describe the CHIMERA code, a supernova code we have developed to simulate core-collapse supernovae in 1, 2, and 3 spatial dimensions. We finally describe the results of an ongoing suite of 2D simulations initiated from a 12, 15, 20, and 25 solar mass progenitor. These have all exhibited explosions and are currently in the expanding phase with the shock at between 5,000 and 10,000 km. We finally very briefly describe an ongoing simulation in 3 spatial dimensions initiated from the 15 solar mass progenitor.