Photosphere Recession and Luminosity of Homologous Explosions Revisited

TL;DR

This paper revisits the modeling of supernova light curves by incorporating the effect of photosphere recession, showing it reduces luminosity predictions and aligning better with observations of Type-IIP supernovae.

Contribution

It introduces a boundary condition approach to account for photosphere recession in homologous supernova explosions, improving the accuracy of luminosity evolution models.

Findings

Photosphere recession decreases supernova luminosity compared to previous models.

The new model aligns better with observed light curves of Type-IIP supernovae.

Recession effects are significant at different phases of the explosion.

Abstract

By assuming the photosphere located at the outmost edge of the ejecta, Arnett et al. (1980, 1982, 1989) presented the light curves of homologous explosions in supernovae analytically and numerically to include recombination effects. Actually as homologous expansion proceeds, the photosphere recedes deeper into the ejecta. In this situation, the photosphere radius increases at early times and decreases later on which can be described by a simple method proposed by Liu et al. (2018). To study how the photosphere recession effect the luminosity evolution, we impose a boundary condition on the photosphere to determine the spatial and time distribution of the temperature of the ejecta which is clarified to be reasonable. We find that the photosphere recession reduce the luminosity compared with the previous result without the recession, which can be tested with observations of Type-IIP supernovae.