Fallback Supernovae: A Possible Origin of Peculiar Supernovae with Extremely Low Explosion Energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates fallback supernovae with low explosion energies, demonstrating their potential to explain peculiar supernovae like SN 2008ha and suggesting links to long gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

It introduces hydrodynamical models of fallback supernovae with low energies, showing their ability to reproduce observed properties of peculiar supernovae and their possible connection to gamma-ray bursts.

Findings

Fallback SNe can produce diverse light curves with limited photospheric velocities.

A model from a 13 Msun progenitor explains SN 2008ha's properties.

SN 2008ha may be a core-collapse SN with significant fallback.

Abstract

We perform hydrodynamical calculations of core-collapse supernovae (SNe) with low explosion energies. These SNe do not have enough energy to eject the whole progenitor and most of the progenitor falls back to the central remnant. We show that such fallback SNe can have a variety of light curves (LCs) but their photospheric velocities can only have some limited values with lower limits. We also perform calculations of nucleosynthesis and LCs of several fallback SN model, and find that a fallback SN from the progenitor with a main-sequence mass of 13 Msun can account for the properties of the peculiar Type Ia supernova SN 2008ha. The kinetic energy and ejecta mass of the model are 1.2*10^{48} erg and 0.074 Msun, respectively, and the ejected 56Ni mass is 0.003 Msun. Thus, SN 2008ha can be a core-collapse SN with a large amount of fallback. We also suggest that SN 2008ha could have been accompanied with long gamma-ray bursts and long gamma-ray bursts without associated SNe may be accompanied with very faint SNe with significant amount of fallback which are similar to SN 2008ha.