Hydrodynamical models of Type II-Plateau Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper develops a one-dimensional hydrodynamic model to simulate Type II-Plateau supernovae, successfully matching observed light curves and velocities, and explores the impact of nickel mixing and progenitor mass on the models.

Contribution

It introduces a new hydrodynamic code for modeling SNe II-P and demonstrates its effectiveness in reproducing observed supernova features with specific physical parameters.

Findings

Good agreement with observed light curves and velocities for SN1999em.

Extensive nickel mixing is necessary to produce a flat plateau.

Models with progenitor mass ≤12 M_\u2299 are inconsistent with observations.

Abstract

We present bolometric light curves of Type II-plateau supernovae (SNe II-P) obtained using a newly developed, one-dimensional Lagrangian hydrodynamic code with flux-limited radiation diffusion. Using our code we calculate the bolometric light curve and photospheric velocities of SN1999em obtaining a remarkably good agreement with observations despite the simplifications used in our calculation. The physical parameters used in our calculation are E=1.25 foe, M= 19 M_\odot, R= 800 R_\odot and M_{Ni}=0.056 M_\odot. We find that an extensive mixing of 56Ni is needed in order to reproduce a plateau as flat as that shown by the observations. We also study the possibility to fit the observations with lower values of the initial mass consistently with upper limits that have been inferred from pre-supernova imaging of SN1999em in connection with stellar evolution models. We cannot find a set of physical parameters that reproduce well the observations for models with pre-supernova mass of \leq 12 M_\odot, although models with 14 M_\odot cannot be fully discarded.