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Core-collapse supernova explosion theory

Nature volume 589, pages 29–39 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Most supernova explosions accompany the death of a massive star. These explosions give birth to neutron stars and black holes, and eject solar masses of heavy elements. However, determining the mechanism of explosion has been a half-century journey of great numerical and physical complexity. Here we present the status of this theoretical quest and the physics and astrophysics upon which its resolution seems to depend. The delayed neutrino-heating mechanism is emerging as the key driver of supernova explosions, but there remain many issues to address, such as the chaos of the involved dynamics.

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Fig. 1: Progenitor mass density profiles.
Fig. 2: Turbulence in the belly of the beast.
Fig. 3: Early 3D explosion of the core of a 16M⊙ star using Fornax.
Fig. 4: Mean shock radii of 2D models.
Fig. 5: Explosion energy and residual neutron star baryon mass.
Fig. 6: Comparison of theoretical and empirical explosion energy versus ejecta mass.
Fig. 7: 3D explosion structure of a representative massive-star progenitor model.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Insley and S. Rizzi of the Argonne National Laboratory and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) for considerable support with the 3D graphics. We also acknowledge ongoing collaborations with H. Nagakura, D. Radice, J. Dolence, A. Skinner and M. Coleman. We acknowledge E. O’Connor regarding the equation of state, G. Martínez-Pinedo concerning electron capture on heavy nuclei, T. Sukhbold and S. Woosley for providing details concerning the initial models, and T. Thompson and T. Wang regarding inelastic scattering. Funding was provided by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research via the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC4) programme and Grant DE-SC0018297 (subaward 00009650) and by the US NSF under grants AST-1714267 and PHY-1804048 (the latter via the Max-Planck/Princeton Center (MPPC) for Plasma Physics). Awards of computer time were provided by the INCITE programme using resources of the ALCF, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357, under a Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois, under a PRAC allocation from the National Science Foundation (#OAC-1809073), and under award #TG-AST170045 to the resource Stampede2 in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE, ACI-1548562). Finally, we employed computational resources provided by the TIGRESS high-performance computer centre at Princeton University, which is jointly supported by the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Princeton University Office of Information Technology, and acknowledge their continuing allocation at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), supported by the DOE Office of Science under contract DE-AC03-76SF00098.

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  1. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    A. Burrows

  2. Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    D. Vartanyan

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  1. A. Burrows
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A.B. organized the paper and wrote most of it. D.V. conducted the 2D calculations. Otherwise, the authors contributed equally to the document.

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Correspondence to A. Burrows.

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Peer review information Nature thanks Friedrich-Karl Thielemann and Stan Woosley for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Burrows, A., Vartanyan, D. Core-collapse supernova explosion theory. Nature 589, 29–39 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03059-w

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