Raffaella Margutti edited section_Introduction_Observations_are_painting__.tex  over 8 years ago

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In this respect, two key observational findings are relevant: (i) The direct detection of luminous precursors in the month before the   major explosion of the H-rich SN2009ip associated with the ejection of $\sim0.1\,\rm{M_{\odot}}$ of material (Margutti et al., 2014). (ii) Evidence for significant modulations in the radio light-curves of hydrogen-stripped SNe (i.e. SNe Ib/c; Wellons et al., 2012, Milisavljevic et al., 2013). This latter finding indicates that a complex environment, sculpted and enriched by a significantly \emph{non-steady} mass loss of the progenitor system in the years before the explosion, surrounds some Type Ib/c SNe.  The two findings above suggest that massive stars might lose their hydrogen envelopes through eruptive mass ejections (instead of steady winds, as it has been assumed so far) on time scales of months to decades before the core-collapse (i.e. much shorter than previously thought). To test this idea here we propose a focused collaborative effort to probe the life of massive stars in the last centuries before death. Our goal is to reconstruct the density profile and mass-loss history of core-collapse SNe (i) using the entire sample of existing radio observations of core-collapse SNe, observations,  (ii) treating the dynamics of the SN shock interaction with the complex medium in a self-consistent way and (iii) by finally connecting our findings to the physics that regulates the time-variable mass loss in massive stars.