Magnetorotational supernovae explosions (Q854332)

Core-collapse supernovae are connected with the formation of neutron stars. Part of the gravitation energy is transformed into the energy of an explosion, observed as SN II and SN Ib,c type supernovae. The mechanism of transformation is not simple because the greatest part of the energy passes into weakly interacting neutrinos. Attempts to use this energy for explaining the explosion were unsuccessful for about 40 years of research. The authors consider the explosion mechanism in which the source of energy is rotation, and the magnetic field serves for the transformation of the rotation energy into the explosion energy. Thereat they explain the whole energy transformation mechanism in detail relating themselves to various of their former particular results. Two-dimensional MHD simulations of the energy transformation mechanism are performed. Therefore, a fully conservative implicit difference scheme is used, providing conservation of mass, momentum and total energy. The authors find that after the collapse, the core consists of a rapidly rotating proton-neutron star with a differentially rotating envelope. The toroidal component of the magnetic field, generated by the differential rotation, grows linearly with the time at the initial stage of the magnetic field evolution. This linear growth is terminated by the development of a magnetohydrodynamic instability when the twisted toroidal component strongly exceeds the poloidal field, leading to a drastic acceleration in the growth of magnetic energy. At the instant when the magnetic pressure becomes comparable to the gas pressure at the periphery of the proto-neutron star, an MHD compression wave appears and propagates through the envelope of the collapsed core. It transforms into a rapid MHD shock and produces a supernovae explosion. By simulation, the authors find an explosion energy of \(0.6 \cdot10^{51}\) erg. The amount of mass ejected by the explosion amounts to about 0.14 solar masses. An implicit numerical method, based on the Lagrangian triangular grid of variable structure, was used for the simulations.