Possible pair-instability supernovae at solar metallicity from magnetic stellar progenitors

Understand

Near-solar metallicity (and low-redshift) Pair-Instability Supernova (PISN) candidates challenge stellar evolution models.

• Indeed, at such a metallicity, even an initially very massive star generally loses so much mass by stellar winds that it will avoid the electron-positron pair-creation instability.
• We use recent results showing that a magnetic field at the surface of a massive star can significantly reduce its effective mass-loss rate to compute magnetic models of very massive stars (VMSs) at solar metallicity and explore the possibility that such stars end as PISNe.
• We implement the quenching of the mass loss produced by a surface dipolar magnetic field into the Geneva stellar evolution code and compute new stellar models with an initial mass of $200\,M_\odot$ at solar metallicity, with and without rotation.