A Massive Star’s Dying Breaths: Pulsating Red Supergiants and Their Resulting Type IIP Supernovae

Abstract

Massive stars undergo fundamental mode and first overtone radial pulsations with periods of 100–1000 days as red supergiants (RSGs). At large amplitudes, these pulsations substantially modify the outer envelope’s density structure encountered by the outgoing shock wave from the eventual core collapse of these stars. Using Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( MESA ), we model the effects of fundamental mode and first overtone pulsations in the RSG envelopes and the resulting Type IIP supernovae (SNe) using MESA + STELLA . We find that, in the case of fundamental mode pulsations, SN plateau observables, such as the luminosity at day 50, L 50 ; time-integrated shock energy, ET; and plateau duration, t p , are consistent with radial scalings derived considering explosions of nonpulsating stars. Namely, most of the effect of the pulsation is consistent with the behavior expected for a star of a different size at the time of explosion. However, in the case of overtone pulsations, the Lagrangian displacement is not monotonic. Therefore, in such cases, excessively bright or faint SN emission at different times reflects the underdense or overdense structure of the emitting region near the SN photosphere.