Binary Interaction Can Yield a Diversity of Circumstellar Media around Type II Supernova Progenitors

Abstract

Recent observations of supernovae (SNe) have indicated that a fraction of massive stars possess dense circumstellar medium (CSM) at the moment of their core collapses. They suggest the presence of additional activities of the SN progenitor driving the enhancement of the mass-loss rate, and some physical processes attributing to a single star’s activities have been considered. In this study, we carry out binary evolutionary simulations of massive stars by MESA and investigate effects on the subsequent CSM formation through hydrodynamical simulations by PLUTO . We show that the mass transfer rate in a binary can increase at the beginning of the Roche lobe overflow, and this enhancement would be associated with the structure of the CSM before the explosion. We also illustrate that, depending on the orbital period of the binary, the density structure of the CSM can have a diverse distribution, including shell-like and cliff-like structures. These characteristic structures appear within the length scale of ∼10 ^17 cm and could be traced by long-term observations of SNe, if the slow velocity of the CSM is assumed (∼10 km s ^−1 ). Our results highlight the importance of binary interaction in the aspect of reproducing the diversity of the CSM configuration.

Keywords

• Massive stars
• Binary stars
• Circumstellar matter
• Core-collapse supernovae
• Stellar mass loss