Black Hole Formation and Explosion from Rapidly Rotating Very Massive Stars

We explore the formation process of a black hole (BH) through the pair-instability collapse of a rotating Population III very massive star in axisymmetric numerical relativity. As the initial condition, we employ a progenitor star which is obtained by evolving a rapidly rotating zero-age main sequence (ZAMS) star with mass $320M_\odot$ until it reaches a pair instability region. We find that for such rapidly rotating model, a fraction of the mass, $\sim 10M_\odot$, forms a torus surrounding the remnant BH of mass $\sim 130M_\odot$ and an outflow is driven by a hydrodynamical effect. We also perform simulations, artificially reducing the initial angular velocity of the progenitor star, and find that only a small or no torus is formed and no outflow is driven. We discuss the possible evolution scenario of the remnant torus for the rapidly rotating model by considering the viscous and recombination effects and show that if the energy of $\sim 10^{52}$ erg is injected from the torus to the envelope, the luminosity and timescale of the explosion could be of the orders of $10^{43}$ erg/s and yrs, respectively. We also point out the possibility for observing gravitational waves associated with the BH formation for the rapidly rotating model by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Ap

Neutrino-driven explosions of ultra-stripped type Ic supernovae generating binary neutron stars

We study explosion characteristics of ultra-stripped supernovae (SNe), which are candidates of SNe generating binary neutron stars (NSs). As a first step, we perform stellar evolutionary simulations of bare carbon-oxygen cores of mass from 1.45 to 2.0 $M_\odot$ until the iron cores become unstable and start collapsing. We then perform axisymmetric hydrodynamics simulations with spectral neutrino transport using these stellar evolution outcomes as initial conditions. All models exhibit successful explosions driven by neutrino heating. The diagnostic explosion energy, ejecta mass, Ni mass, and NS mass are typically $\sim 10^{50}$ erg, $\sim 0.1 M_\odot$, $\sim 0.01M_\odot$, and $\approx 1.3 M_\odot$, which are compatible with observations of rapidly-evolving and luminous transient such as SN 2005ek. We also find that the ultra-stripped SN is a candidate for producing the secondary low-mass NS in the observed compact binary NSs like PSR J0737-3039.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in MNRA

Climatic factors affecting the tree-ring width of Betula ermanii at the timberline on Mount Norikura, central Japan

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comArticleECOLOGICAL RESEARCH. 20(4):445-451(2005)journal articl