The Nickel Mass Distribution of Normal Type II Supernovae

Abstract

Core-collapse supernova explosions expose the structure and environment of massive stars at the moment of their death. We use the global fitting technique of Pejcha & Prieto (2015a,b) to estimate a set of physical parameters of 19 normal Type II SNe, such as their distance moduli, reddenings, 56Ni masses M${\rm Ni},andexplosionenergiesE{\rm exp}frommulticolorlightcurvesandphotosphericvelocitycurves.WeconfirmandcharacterizeknowncorrelationsbetweenMNiandbolometricluminosityat50daysaftertheexplosion,andbetweenMNiandEexp.WepayspecialattentiontotheobserveddistributionofM{\rm Ni}comingfromajointsampleof38TypeIISNe,whichcanbedescribedasaskewedGaussianlikedistributionbetween0.005M{\odot}and0.280M{\odot},withamedianof0.031M{\odot},meanof0.046M{\odot},standarddeviationof0.048M{\odot}$ and skewness of 3.050. We use two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and two-sample Anderson-Darling test to compare the observed distribution of MNi to results from theoretical hydrodynamical codes of core-collapse explosions with the neutrino mechanism presented in the literature. Our results show that the theoretical distributions obtained from the codes tested in this work, KEPLER and Prometheus Hot Bubble, are compatible with the observations irrespective of different pre-supernova calibrations and different maximum mass of the progenitors.

Publication
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 841, Issue 2, article id. 127, 14 pp. (2017)