Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
1780111 | New Astronomy Reviews | 2008 | 6 Pages |
Abstract
Ever since Shklovskii's influential 1962 paper, the literature tends to model supernovae (SNe) with strong shock waves (or blast waves), implying reverse shocks, Sedov stages, and the like. Here I repeat my conviction since 1988, that all SNe are of the core-collapse type, and are expelled by the collapsing core's wound-up magnetic field plus its decay product - an ultra-high-energy (UHE) relativistic cavity - which serves as the ultimate piston. The piston's Rayleigh-Taylor instability tears the ejected envelope into a huge number (â«103) of (magnetized, filamentary) fragments, or splinters. The critical stellar mass Mcrit for core collapse to happen is closer to 5 Mâ than to 8 Mâ. SN remnants are former stellar windzones, collisionally heated when traversed by the shell of ejected SN splinters and by its relativistic piston (which has strongly cooled, though, via adiabatic expansion).
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Physical Sciences and Engineering
Physics and Astronomy
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Authors
Wolfgang Kundt,