TY - JOUR
T1 - The effect of jet-ejecta interaction on the viewing angle dependence of kilonova light curves
AU - Klion, Hannah
AU - Duffell, Paul C.
AU - Kasen, Daniel
AU - Quataert, Eliot
N1 - Funding Information:
This researchwas funded by the Gordon andBetty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF5076. HK was supported in part by a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship under grant number DE-FG02-97ER25308. EQ and DK were also supported in part by Simons Investigator awards from the Simons Foundation. DK is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 and DE-SC0004658, and by a SciDAC award DE-SC0018297. This research was supported by the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC). The simulations presented here were carried out and processed using the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and the Savio computational cluster resource provided by the Berkeley Research Computing program at the University of California, Berkeley (supported by the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Vice Chancellor of Research, and Office of the Chief Information Officer).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.
PY - 2021/3/1
Y1 - 2021/3/1
N2 - The merger of two neutron stars produces an outflow of radioactive heavy nuclei. Within a second of merger, the central remnant is expected to also launch a relativistic jet, which shock-heats and disrupts a portion of the radioactive ejecta. Within a few hours, emission from the radioactive material gives rise to an ultraviolet, optical, and infrared transient (a kilonova). We use the endstates of a suite of 2D relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of jet-ejecta interaction as initial conditions for multidimensional Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations of the resulting viewing angle-dependent light curves and spectra starting at 1.5 h after merger. We find that on this time-scale, jet shock heating does not affect the kilonova emission for the jet parameters we survey. However, the jet disruption to the density structure of the ejecta does change the light curves. The jet carves a channel into the otherwise spheroidal ejecta, revealing the hot, inner regions. As seen from near (≲30°) the jet axis, the kilonova is brighter by a factor of a few and bluer. The strength of this effect depends on the jet parameters, since the light curves of more heavily disrupted ejecta are more strongly affected. The light curves and spectra are also more heavily modified in the ultraviolet than in the optical.
AB - The merger of two neutron stars produces an outflow of radioactive heavy nuclei. Within a second of merger, the central remnant is expected to also launch a relativistic jet, which shock-heats and disrupts a portion of the radioactive ejecta. Within a few hours, emission from the radioactive material gives rise to an ultraviolet, optical, and infrared transient (a kilonova). We use the endstates of a suite of 2D relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of jet-ejecta interaction as initial conditions for multidimensional Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations of the resulting viewing angle-dependent light curves and spectra starting at 1.5 h after merger. We find that on this time-scale, jet shock heating does not affect the kilonova emission for the jet parameters we survey. However, the jet disruption to the density structure of the ejecta does change the light curves. The jet carves a channel into the otherwise spheroidal ejecta, revealing the hot, inner regions. As seen from near (≲30°) the jet axis, the kilonova is brighter by a factor of a few and bluer. The strength of this effect depends on the jet parameters, since the light curves of more heavily disrupted ejecta are more strongly affected. The light curves and spectra are also more heavily modified in the ultraviolet than in the optical.
KW - neutron star mergers
KW - radiative transfer
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stab042
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stab042
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102358547
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 502
SP - 865
EP - 875
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 1
ER -