Ellipsars: Ring-like explosions from flattened stars

Understand

The stellar cataclysms producing astronomical transients have long been modeled as either a point-like explosion or jet-like engine ignited at the center of a spherically symmetric star.

• However, many stars are observed, or are expected on theoretical grounds, not to be precisely spherically symmetric, but rather to have a slightly flattened geometry similar to that of an oblate spheroid.
• Here we present axisymmetric two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of the dynamics of point-like explosions initiated at the center of an aspherical massive star with a range of oblateness.
• We refer to these exploding aspherical stars as "ellipsars" in reference to the elliptical shape of the iso-density contours of their progenitors in the two-dimensional axisymmetric case.