Supernova lightCURVE POPulation Synthesis II: Validation against supernovae with an observed progenitor

TL;DR

This study synthesizes supernova light curves from single-star progenitors, validating models against observed supernovae with progenitor data, and estimates explosion parameters with comparable precision to direct imaging.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate supernova progenitor and nickel masses from light curves, validated against observed data, highlighting dependencies on initial mass and identifying model limitations.

Findings

Most supernovae have explosion energies around 10^50.52 ergs.

Nickel mass and mixing depend on progenitor mass.

Two supernovae fits were poor, suggesting model improvements.

Abstract

We use the results of a supernova light-curve population synthesis to predict the range of possible supernova light curves arising from a population of single-star progenitors that lead to type IIP supernovae. We calculate multiple models varying the initial mass, explosion energy, nickel mass and nickel mixing and then compare these to type IIP supernovae with detailed light curve data and pre-explosion imaging progenitor constraints. Where a good fit is obtained to observations, we are able to achieve initial progenitor and nickel mass estimates from the supernova lightcurve that are comparable in precision to those obtained from progenitor imaging. For two of the eleven IIP supernovae considered our fits are poor, indicating that more progenitor models should be included in our synthesis or that our assumptions, regarding factors such as stellar mass loss rates or the rapid final stages of stellar evolution, may need to be revisited in certain cases. Using the results of our analysis we are able to show that most of the type IIP supernovae have an explosion energy of the order of log(E_exp/ergs)=50.52+/-0.10 and that both the amount of nickel in the supernovae and the amount of mixing may have a dependence on initial progenitor mass.