The Evolution of Low Mass Helium Stars towards Supernova Type I Explosion

Abstract

We explore the hypothesis, that helium stars in a certain mass range can evolve to a carbon core explosion similar to what is widely accepted as an explanation for the SN I phenomenon. This should happen when their carbon-oxygen core grows thanks to the helium shell burning above the core. We found that in the mass range of about 1.7-2.2 Msun, indeed this can happen. The main new insight we believe we gained is the crucial importance of an "early" off-center ignition of carbon, which at a later stage prevents the carbon which forms below the helium burning shell and ignites, from burning the carbon all the way to the center. When helium is almost depleted in the convective envelope by the helium burning shell at its bottom, the now super-Chandrasekhar mass carbon-oxygen core contracts, and the residual degenerate carbon at the center is ignited, resulting in a runaway similar to the classical SN I scenario. Since the structure and behavior of the carbon-oxygen core of the helium stars of our interest is very similar to that of a mass accreting carbon-oxygen star, we also thoroughly examined the behavior of carbon-oxygen stars. We discovered that the models which ignite carbon off-center (in the mass range of about 1.05-1.18 Msun, depending on the carbon mass fraction) present an interesting SN I progenitor scenario of their own, since whereas in the standard scenario runaway always takes place at the same density of about 2E9 gr/cm3, in our case, due to the small amount of carbon ignited, we get a whole range of densities from 1E9 up to 6E9 gr/cm3.