Type II supernovae Early Light Curves

Understand

Observations of type II supernova early light, from breakout until recombination, can be used to constrain the explosion energy and progenitor properties.

• Currently available for this purpose are purely analytic models, which are accurate only to within an order of magnitude, and detailed numerical simulations, which are more accurate but are applied to any event separately.
• In this paper we derive an analytic model that is calibrated by numerical simulations.
• This model is much more accurate than previous analytic models, yet it is as simple to use.