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Caltech

TAPIR Seminar

Friday, November 8, 2019
2:00pm to 3:00pm
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Cahill 370
Early light from Aspherical explosions
Itai Linial, Graduate Student, The Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University,

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.

For more information, please contact JoAnn Boyd by phone at x4280 or by email at [email protected].