Luminous supernovae associated with ultra-long gamma-ray bursts from hydrogen-free progenitors extended by pulsational pair-instability

Abstract

We show that the luminous supernovae associated with ultra-long gamma-ray bursts can be related to the slow cooling from the explosions of hydrogen-free progenitors extended by pulsational pair-instability. In the accompanying paper (Marchant & Moriya 2020), we have shown that some rapidly-rotating hydrogen-free gamma-ray burst progenitors that experience pulsational pair-instability can keep an extended structure caused by pulsational pair-instability until the core collapse. Such progenitors have large radii exceeding 10 R ⊙ and they sometimes reach beyond 1000 R ⊙ at the time of the core collapse. They are, therefore, promising progenitors of ultra-long gamma-ray bursts. We here perform the light-curve modeling of the explosions of one extended hydrogen-free progenitor with a radius of 1962 R ⊙ . The progenitor mass is 50 M ⊙ and 5 M ⊙ exists in the extended envelope. We use one-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics code STELLA in which the explosions are initiated artificially by setting given explosion energy and 56 Ni mass. Thanks to the large progenitor radius, the ejecta experience slow cooling after the shock breakout and they become rapidly evolving ( 10 days) luminous ( 10 43 erg s −1 ) supernovae in optical even without the energy input from the 56 Ni nuclear decay when the explosion energy is more than 10 52 erg. The 56 Ni decay energy input can affect the light curves after the optical light-curve peak and make the light-curve decay slow when the 56 Ni mass is around 1 M ⊙ . They also have fast photospheric velocity above 10,000 km s −1 and hot photospheric temperature above 10,000 K at around the peak luminosity. We find that the rapid rise and luminous peak found in the optical light curve of SN 2011kl, which is associated with the ultra-long gamma-ray burst GRB 111209A, can be explained as the cooling phase of the extended progenitor. The subsequent slow light-curve decline can be related to the 56 Ni decay energy input. The ultra-long gamma-ray burst progenitors proposed in Marchant & Moriya (2020) can explain both the ultra-long gamma-ray burst duration and the accompanying supernova properties. When the gamma-ray burst jet is off-axis or choked, the luminous supernovae could be observed as fast blue optical transients without accompanying gamma-ray bursts.