Primary and secondary source of energy in the superluminous supernova 2018ibb

TL;DR

This study models superluminous supernova 2018ibb using pair-instability supernova theory, showing that a 34 Msun nickel core explains the observed light curves and spectra, with additional energy sources possibly from circumstellar interaction.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a pair-instability supernova model with 34 Msun of nickel can reproduce the observed features of SN 2018ibb, highlighting the role of circumstellar matter in explaining excess luminosity.

Findings

Pair-instability model with 34 Msun of 56Ni fits the light curves.

Synthetic spectra resemble observed spectra.

Circumstellar interaction may explain luminosity and spectral excesses.

Abstract

We examine the pair-instability origin of superluminous supernova 2018ibb. As the base model, we use a non-rotating stellar model with an initial mass of 250 Msun at about 1/15 solar metallicity. We consider three versions of the model as input for radiative transfer simulations done with the STELLA and ARTIS codes: with 25 Msun of 56Ni, 34 Msun of 56Ni, and a chemically mixed case with 34 Msun of 56Ni. We present light curves and spectra in comparison to the observed data of SN 2018ibb, and conclude that the pair-instability supernova model with 34 Msun of 56Ni explains broad-band light curves reasonably well between -100 and 250 days around the peak. Our synthetic spectra have many similarities with the observed spectra. The luminosity excess in the light curves and the blue-flux excess in the spectra can be explained by an additional energy source, which may be interaction of the SN ejecta with circumstellar matter. We discuss possible mechanisms of the origin of the circumstellar matter being ejected in the decades before the pair-instability explosion.