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Abstract:
Thermal bombs are a widely used method to artificially trigger explosions of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) to determine their nucleosynthesis or ejecta and remnant properties. Recently, their use in spherically symmetric (1D) hydrodynamic simulations led to the result that 56, 57Ni and 44Ti are massively underproduced compared to observational estimates for Supernova 1987A, if the explosions are slow, i.e. if the explosion mechanism of CCSNe releases the explosion energy on long time-scales. It was concluded that rapid explosions are required to match observed abundances, i.e. the explosion mechanism must provide the CCSN energy nearly instantaneously on time-scales of some ten to order 100 ms. This result, if valid, would disfavour the neutrino-heating mechanism, which releases the CCSN energy on time-scales of seconds. Here, we demonstrate by 1D hydrodynamic simulations and nucleosynthetic post-processing that these conclusions are a consequence of disregarding the initial collapse of the stellar core in the thermal-bomb modelling before the bomb releases the explosion energy. We demonstrate that the anticorrelation of 56Ni yield and energy-injection time-scale vanishes when the initial collapse is included and that it can even be reversed, i.e. more 56Ni is made by slower explosions, when the collapse proceeds to small radii similar to those where neutrino heating takes place in CCSNe. We also show that the 56Ni production in thermal-bomb explosions is sensitive to the chosen mass cut and that a fixed mass layer or fixed volume for the energy deposition cause only secondary differences. Moreover, we propose a most appropriate setup for thermal bombs.
