Can Luminous, Rapidly Evolving Optical Transients be Explained by the Magnetar-powered Stripped Core-Collapse Supernova Model? [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09604


Over the past decade, many rapidly evolving optical transients (REOTs), whose rise and decline timescales are significantly shorter than those of canonical supernovae (SNe), have been discovered and studied. Some REOTs have high peak luminosity ($\gtrsim 10^{43}$ erg s$^{-1}$), disfavoring the radioactivity-powered-SN model that has been widely adopted to explain normal SNe. In this paper, we study three luminous REOTs (PS1-10bjp, PS1-11bbq, and PS1-13ess) and use a model involving magnetar energy input to fit their bolometric light curves and temperature evolution. We find that core-collapse SNe (CCSNe) powered by magnetars with $P_0 \approx 18$–34 ms and $B_p \approx$ (2.5–5.8) $\times10^{15}$ G can reproduce their bolometric light curves as well as the temperature evolution. The inferred values of ejecta mass are $\sim 0.40$–0.46 M$_\odot$, slightly smaller than that of the Type Ic SN 1994I, indicating that they can be explained by the magnetar-powered stripped CCSN model.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Wang, L. Wang, L. Li, et. al.
Tue, 23 Apr 19
17/58

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure, Submitted to ApJ