The Biggest Explosions in the Universe
Jarrett L. Johnson (LANL), Daniel J. Whalen (LANL, Heidelberg ITA),, Wesley Even (LANL), Chris L. Fryer (LANL), Alex Heger (Monash), Joseph Smidt, (LANL), Ke-Jung Chen (Minnesota)

TL;DR
This paper models an extremely energetic supernova from a supermassive primordial star, revealing its impact on early galaxy evolution and potential chemical signatures in second-generation stars.
Contribution
It presents the first detailed simulation of a supermassive star supernova, exploring its evolution and effects on the host galaxy and surrounding medium.
Findings
The supernova completely evacuates the host dark matter halo within 10 Myr.
Metal-enriched gas recollapses into the halo, enabling second-generation star formation.
The explosion's chemical signature may be detectable in ancient stars today.
Abstract
Supermassive primordial stars are expected to form in a small fraction of massive protogalaxies in the early universe, and are generally conceived of as the progenitors of the seeds of supermassive black holes (BHs). Supermassive stars with masses of ~55,000 M_Sun, however, have been found to explode and completely disrupt in a supernova (SN) with an energy of up to ~10^55 erg instead of collapsing to a BH. Such events, ~10,000 times more energetic than typical SNe today, would be among the biggest explosions in the history of the universe. Here we present a simulation of such a SN in two stages. Using the RAGE radiation hydrodynamics code we first evolve the explosion from an early stage through the breakout of the shock from the surface of the star until the blast wave has propagated out to several parsecs from the explosion site, which lies deep within an atomic cooling dark matter…
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