Numerical Modeling of the Early Light Curves of Type IIP Supernovae

Viktoriya Morozova, Anthony L. Piro, Mathieu Renzo, and Christian D. Ott,
ApJ 829, 109 (2016)

Abstract

The early rise of Type IIP supernovae (SN IIP) provides important information for constraining the properties of their progenitors. This can in turn be compared to pre-explosion imaging constraints and stellar models to develop a more complete picture of how massive stars evolve and end their lives. Using the SuperNova Explosion Code (SNEC), we model the first 40 days of SNe IIP to better understand what constraints can be derived from their early light curves. We use two sets of red supergiant progenitor models with zero-age main sequence masses in the range between 9 Msun and 20 Msun. We find that the early properties of the light curve depend most sensitively on the radius of the progenitor, and thus provide a relation between the g-band rise time and the radius at the time of explosion. This relation will be useful for deriving constraints on progenitors from future observations, especially in cases where detailed modeling of the entire rise is not practical. When comparing to observed rise times, the radii we find are a factor of a few larger than previous semi-analytic derivations and generally in better agreement with what is found with current stellar evolution calculations.

 

SNEC

All results presented in this paper can be obtained with versions 1.01 or 1.00 of SNEC provided here: https://stellarcollapse.org/SNEC

 

MESA Progenitor Models

We used the open-source stellar evolution code MESA revision 7624 to generate presupernova models for SNEC explosion calculations. We used settings identical to those described in Morozova et al. (2015). All MESA inputs needed to reproduce our models and all presupernova models generated are available for download here: https://stellarcollapse.org/simdata/morozova2016_MESA.tar.gz (~76 MB)

 

Light Curves

We provide bolometric and g-band light curves for all our explosion models for download: https://stellarcollapse.org/simdata/morozova2016_lightcurves.tar.gz (~4.5 MB). The light curves of the freely available MESA models can be reproduced by using the above MESA models and the SNEC code, available from https://stellarcollapse.org/SNEC.