Emission peaks in the light curve of core collapse supernovae by late jets

Noa Kaplan, Noam Soker

Published 2019-07-11Version 1

We build a toy model where the central object, i.e., a newly born neutron star or a black hole, launches jets at late times and show that these jets might account for peaks in the light curve of some peculiar core collapse supernovae (CCSNe) when the jets interact with the CCSN ejecta. We assume that the central object accretes fall back material and launches two short-lived opposite jets weeks to months after the explosion. We model each jet-ejecta interaction as a spherically symmetric `mini explosion' that takes place inside the ejecta. In our toy model late jets form stronger emission peaks than early jets. Late jets with a kinetic energy of only about one percent of the kinetic energy of the CCSN itself might form strong emission peaks. We apply our toy model to the brightest peak of the enigmatic CCSN iPTF14hls that has several extra peaks in its light curve. We can fit this emission peak with our toy model when we take the kinetic energy of the jets to be about one percent of the CCSN energy, and the shocked ejecta mass to be about one percent of the ejecta mass.