Stellar collapse

Abstract

The collapse of massive stars have been used to explain many of the largest outbursts known to mankind, from supernovae to hypernovae to gamma-ray bursts. These explosions differ in their level of asymmetry and the spectral energy of the photons they emit. It is likely that such a wide range in the nature of these explosions requires more than one explosion mechanism to extract the gravitational potential energy released during the collapse. Three major classes of mechanisms have been proposed: neutrino-driven, magnetic-field driven, collapsar (black hole accretion disk) driven. This review discusses each mechanism in turn, discussing the current state-of-the-art calculations along with their observational predictions. We conclude with a summary of the current observational constraints on these models.