A Theoretical Study of the Interaction between Supernovae and Their Surroundings

Abstract

This work presents an overview of the physics of supernovae and of their interaction with a circumstellar medium. In particular the reverse shock created by the interaction is investigated. In most types of the supernovae this shock is radiative, and due to the high temperature most of the radiation comes out as X-rays. We analyze the details of the numerical calculation of the adiabatic simulation to study the evolution of the earliest phases of a supernova explosion when the stellar atmosphere ejected by the explosion interacts with the environment of the star. This process is often called “circumstellar interaction”. The interaction depends on the properties of the wind, i.e. the wind velocity and mass loss rate of the progenitor as well as the composition of the wind. We assumed that both the supernova ejecta and the environment are spherically symmetric, which allows us to solve the problem in one dimension, with as spatial variable the radius r.