Understand
Motivated by their role as the direct or indirect source of many of the elements in the Universe, numerical modeling of core collapse supernovae began more than five decades ago.
- Progress toward ascertaining the explosion mechanism(s) has been realized through increasingly sophisticated models, as physics and dimensionality have been added, as physics and numerical modeling have improved, and as the leading computational resources available to modelers have become far more capable.
- The past five to ten years have witnessed the emergence of a consensus across the core collapse supernova modeling community that had not existed in the four decades prior.
- For the majority of progenitors - i.e., slowly rotating progenitors - the efficacy of the delayed shock mechanism, where the stalled supernova shock wave is revived by neutrino heating by neutrinos emanating from the proto-neutron star, has been demonstrated by all core collapse supernova modeling groups, across progenitor mass and metallicity.