Hydrodynamical Modeling of the Light Curves of Core-collapse Supernovae with HYPERION. I. The Mass Range 13-25 M-circle dot, the Metallicities-3 <= [Fe/H] <= 0, and the Case of SN 1999em

Abstract

We present the last version of HYdrodynamic Ppm Explosion with Radiation diffusION (Hyperion), a hydrodynamic code designed to calculate the explosive nucleosynthesis, remnant mass, and light curve associated with the explosion of a massive star. By means of this code, we compute the explosion of a subset of red supergiant models taken from the database published by Limongi & Chieffi for various explosion energies in the range ∼0.20-2.00 × 1051 erg. The main outcomes of these simulations, i.e., remnant mass, synthesized 56Ni, luminosity, and length of the plateau of the bolometric light curve, are analyzed as a function of the initial parameters of the star (mass and metallicity) and the explosion energy. As a first application of Hyperion, we estimated the mass and metallicity of the progenitor star of SN 1999em, a well-studied Type IIP supernova, by means of the light-curve fitting. In particular, if the adopted distance to the host galaxy NGC 1637 is 7.83 Mpc, the properties of the light curve point toward a progenitor with an initial mass of 13 M o˙ and a metallicity [Fe/H] =-1. If, on the contrary, the adopted distance modulus is 11.7 Mpc, all models with initial mass 13 ≤ M/M o˙ ≤ 15 and metallicities-1 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ 0 are compatible with the progenitor of SN 1999em.