Supernovae

A supernova is the giant explosion of a star. There are two main classes: core collapse and thermonuclear. The core collapse SNe are massive stars at the end of their nuclear burning lives. Their cores collapse to neutron stars or black holes and release neutrinos. The neutrinos captured in the outer layers are the essential cause of the explosion. Thermonuclear SNe are believed to be the explosions of white dwarfs: mass accretion from a companion builds the WD up to nearly the Chandrasekhar mass limit, but before collapse the WD explodes. Both SN classes produce expanding remnants that interact with the interstellar medium (ISM) and inject heavy elements into the ISM.

Images

  1. ../../astro/sne/noao_sn1987a.jpg SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

    Modern Supernova 1987A: the bright, pointy star near the center. SN 1987A is in a dwarf galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud that is a satellite of our galaxy. Many of the stars in this picture are foreground stars in our Galaxy. The pink region is the 30 Doradus, a bright emission region gas in the LMC. It's a star formation region. Incidentally this most famous of all modern supernovae was discovered by Ian Shelton, the brother of my UNLV colleague David Shelton.

    Credit: Marcelo Bass, CTIO/NOAO/AURA/NSF .

Sites

  1. Asiago The Asiago-Padova (Padua) Group and the Asiago Supernova Catalog
  2. Historical Supernovae The Crab Nebula SN (SN 1054), Tycho (SN 1572), Kepler (SN 1604), Cas A (SN 1667?): and all the other good old supernovae.
  3. Marcos Montes' Supernova page
  4. Spectra Catalog Jeffery's heterogeneous catalog of old spectra
  5. Spectra Catalog: Suspect The University of Oklahoma spectra catalog. In time it should be an excellent resource.

Papers

The papers are just in the reverse order that they appeared.

  1. ``The Diversity of Cosmic Explosions: Gamma-Ray Bursts and Type Ib/c Supernovae'' Berger, E. 2003, in proceedings of "3-D signatures in stellar explosions", in press, astro-ph/0309714. Edo claims overlap of Ib/c with GRBs is 3 % and thus insignificant. Well this may be true, but I think he is maybe going too far on too little. It's not clear to me that radio modeling always counts all the energy correctly. But I'm an ignoramous.
  2. ``The Type Ic Hypernova SN 2003dh/GRB 030329'' Mazzali, P. A. 2003, ApJL, submitted, astro-ph/0309555. Decent report on early spectral and light curve modeling. On light curves they arn't so far from Woosley & Heger.
  3. ``The Light Curve of the Unusual Supernova SN 2003dh'' Woosley, S. E., & Heger, A. 2003, ApJ, submitted, astro-ph/0309165. It would help if they were trying to fit some data.
  4. ``Photometry and Spectroscopy of GRB 030329 and Its Associated Supernova 2003dh: The First Two Months'' Matheson, T., et al. 2003, ApJ, in press, astro-ph/0307435. Round up the usual suspects. The main paper almost beyond doubt proving some supernovae are related to at least some gamma-ray bursts.
  5. ``High-resolution optical studies of nearby Type Ia supernovae'' Lundquist, P. et al. 2003, in "Supernovae", IAU Colloquium 192, eds. J.M. Marcaide, K.W. Weiler, in press, astro-ph/0309006. Nothing to exciting, but we have to keep looking for faint early circumstellar emission from Ia's.
  6. ``Type Ia supernovae in dense circumstellar gas'' Chugai, N. N., & Yungelson, L. R. 2003, Astronomy Letters, in press, astro-ph/0308297. For 2002ic these guys don't like the double degenerate merger model with a left over envelope. It requires too much synchronization.
  7. ``A Common Origin for Cosmic Explosions Inferred from Fireball Calorimetry'' Berger, E., & et al. 2003, Nature, in press, astro-ph/0308187. Well some GRB are strong in gamma rays and some are weak in gamma rays but overall jet energy may be very constant. Not a lot in this paper.
  8. ``Identification of Type Ia Supernovae at Redshift 1.3 and Beyond with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on HST'' Riess, A., et al. 2003, ApJL, in press. The boys are working hard to solve cosmology with Ia's.
  9. ``Type Ia Supernovae: Progenitors and Diversities'' Nomoto, K., et al. 2003, in "From Twilight to Highlight: The Physics of Supernovae," eds. W. Hillebrandt & B. Leibundgut (Berlin: Springer), 115. A bit of a slog when on is sleepy.
  10. Have the Elusive Progenitors of Supernovae Type Ia Been Discovered?'' Livio, M., & Riess, A. 2003, astro-ph/0308018. They say that SN Ia 2002ic with hydrogen actually suggests the double-degenerate scenario. 2003aug04
  11. ``Carbon Ignition in Type Ia Supernovae: An Analytic Model'', Woosley, S. E., Wunsch, S., & Kuhlen, M. 2003, ApJ, submitted, astro-ph/0307565. Stan thinks off-center multi-point ignition which is quasi-spherically symmetric is needed for Ia explosions.
  12. ``Supernovae in Galaxy Clusters'' Yam-Gal, A., et al. (including Filippenko) 2003, Proceedings of IAU Colloquium 192 ``Supernovae (10 years of SN1993J)'', Valencia, Spain, eds. J.M. Marcaide and K.W. Weiler (???:???), astro-ph/0307520. Just a little paper on rates, but they have found intergalactic SNe it seems.
  13. ``Photometry and Spectroscopy of GRB 030329 and its Associated Supernova 2003dh: The First Two Months'' Matheson, T., et al. 2003, ApJ, submitted, astro-ph/0307435. Pretty much the definitive paper showing that some GRBs arise from some core collapse SNe.
  14. ``Pulsar Recoil by Large-Scale Anisotropies in Supernova Explosions'' 2003jul22, L. Scheck et al. including Janka and Mueller.
  15. ``Evidence for an asymmptotic giant branch star in the progenitor system of a type Ia supernova'' 2003jul21, Mario Hamuy et al. A postscript of this paper is in my sn2002ic directory.
  16. ``White Dwarfs Near Black Holes: A New Paradigm for Type I Supernovae'' 2003jul21, Jim Wilson & Grant Mathews
  17. ``Observations and Theory of Supernovae'' 2002, then 2003 in Am. J. of Phys., J. C. Wheeler. A good, curt review of all supernova research with good references.
Papers: old way