TAPIR Seminar

The first photons from a supernova explosion emerge when the supernova's radiation-dominated shock breaks out of the stellar surface, heralding an energetic transient event. While challenging to detect, these early shock-breakout photons carry invaluable information about the progenitor's properties, its immediate environment, and the explosion mechanism. In this talk, I will discuss the early light of various explosive transients, when either the explosion or the progenitor are aspherical. I will present our new analytical hydrodynamic solutions to the flow resulting from the breakout of an oblique shock from the stellar surface. I will then present a few examples where modest deviations from sphericity drastically alter the early lightcurve compared with the spherical case. I will conclude by commenting on the implications of our theory to future observations and interpretation of shock breakouts.