Circumbinary Discs as the Origin of Circumstellar Material around Interacting H-poor Supernovae and Fast Blue Optical Transients

Abstract

Around 10 % of hydrogen-poor supernovae explode inside compact ($\sim 10^{15}$ cm), massive ($\sim 0.1 \ \mathrm{M_\odot}$) circumstellar material (CSM), signalling an episode of enhanced pre-explosion mass loss whose mechanism remains unclear. The extreme members of this population are considered to constitute some of the Fast Blue Optical Transients (FBOTs), which exhibit rapid rise times of $\sim$ few days and high peak luminosity $\sim 10^{44} \ \mathrm{erg}$. Recent binary evolution calculations show that the expansion of helium stars during their latest evolutionary stages can trigger a rapid but stable mass-transfer episode that can form a dense circumbinary disc (CBD) that may explain the observed dense CSM. However, a detailed, quantitative analysis of this process and the resulting CBD properties such as its mass, radius and density profile has not yet been undertaken. We present a set of models that solve the viscous evolution of such a CBD under time-dependent mass injection. We find that although the injected mass is initially sub-Keplerian, a lower ``accretion eigenvalue'' $\chi$ prevents more mass from falling back onto the central binary. For our fiducial set of models, the CBD immediately prior to the explosion reaches a mass of $0.07-0.20 \ \mathrm{M}_\odot$, a half-mass radius of $640 - 4000 \ \mathrm{R}_\odot$, and an aspect ratio of $\theta = H/R \sim 0.1$. We also show that the interaction between SN ejecta and the CBD can power some of the fastest-evolving interacting Type Ibc SNe that can be classified as FBOTs, such as SN 2018gep or SN 2019jc. Despite uncertainties in the model parameters, our results demonstrate that CBD formation triggered by rapid, stable mass transfer is a viable mechanism to explain the dense circumstellar environments observed around rapid, hydrogen-poor interacting SNe. (abridged)