# Evolution of supernovae-driven superbubbles with conduction and cooling

## TL;DR

This study uses hydrodynamic simulations to explore how thermal conduction and cooling influence the evolution and internal structure of supernova-driven superbubbles, revealing significant deviations from classical models.

## Contribution

It introduces a new analytic model incorporating cooling effects, improving predictions of superbubble evolution over classical similarity solutions.

## Key findings

- Evaporation reduces interior temperature and increases density by over an order of magnitude.
- Most conductive heat flux is lost to cooling, lowering evaporation rates compared to classical models.
- Supernova blast waves remain supersonic in the interior for the first ~30 SNe.

## Abstract

We use spherically symmetric hydrodynamic simulations to study the dynamical evolution and internal structure of superbubbles (SBs) driven by clustered supernovae (SNe), focusing on the effects of thermal conduction and cooling in the interface between the hot bubble interior and cooled shell. Our simulations employ an effective diffusivity to account for turbulent mixing from nonlinear instabilities that are not captured in 1D. The conductive heat flux into the shell is balanced by a combination of cooling in the interface and evaporation of shell gas into the bubble interior. This evaporation increases the density, and decreases the temperature, of the SB interior by more than an order of magnitude relative to simulations without conduction. However, most of the energy conducted into the interface is immediately lost to cooling, reducing the evaporative mass flux required to balance conduction. As a result, the evaporation rate is typically a factor of $\sim$3-30 lower than predicted by the classical similarity solution of Weaver et al. (1977), which neglects cooling. Blast waves from the first $\sim$30 SNe remain supersonic in the SB interior because reduced evaporation from the interface lowers the mass they sweep up in the hot interior. Updating the Weaver solution to include cooling, we construct a new analytic model to predict the cooling rate, evaporation rate, and temporal evolution of SBs. The cooling rate, and hence the hot gas mass, momentum, and energy delivered by SBs, is set by the ambient ISM density and the efficiency of nonlinear mixing at the bubble/shell interface.