A systematic study on the rise time-peak luminosity relation for bright optical transients powered by wind shock breakout

TL;DR

This study systematically explores how the peak luminosity and rise time of wind shock breakout transients relate, using extensive simulations to understand their distribution and implications for observed optical transients.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the peak luminosity-rise time relation for interaction-powered transients through over 500 simulations, offering new insights into their observational characteristics.

Findings

Distribution pattern of luminosity and rise time for transients

Dependence of light curve features on circumstellar and ejecta parameters

Implications for classifying and understanding observed optical transients

Abstract

A number of astrophyical transients originating from stellar explosions are powered by the collision of the ejected material with the circumstellar medium, which efficiently produces thermal radiation via shock dissipation. We investigate how such interaction-powered transients are distributed in the peak bolometric luminosity vs the rise time phase space. Taking the advantage of less time-consuming one-dimensional simulations with spherical symmetry, we calculated more than 500 models with different circumstellar mass and radius, ejecta mass and energy, and chemical compositions. The peak bolometric luminosity, the total radiated energy, and the rise time of the interaction-powered emission are measured for each simulated light curve. We consider how these characteristic quantities are determined as a function of the model parameters and discuss possible implications for the observed populations of (potential) interaction-powered transients, such as type IIn supernovae and fast blue optical transients.