How do supernova remnants cool? -- I. Morphology, optical emission lines, and shocks

Abstract

Supernovae (SNe) inject $\sim 10^{51}$ erg in the interstellar medium, thereby shocking and heating the gas. A substantial fraction of this energy is later lost via radiative cooling. We present a post-processing module for the FLASH code to calculate the cooling radiation from shock-heated gas using collisional excitation data from MAPPINGS V. When applying this tool to a simulated SN remnant (SNR), we find that most energy is emitted in the EUV. However, optical emission lines ($[$O III$]$, $[$N II$]$, $[$S II$]$, H${\alpha}$, H${\beta}$) are usually best observable. Our shock detection scheme shows that [S II] and [N II] emissions arise from the thin shell surrounding the SNR, while [O III], H$\rm \alpha$, and H$\rm \beta$ originate from the volume-filling hot gas inside the SNR bubble. We find that the optical emission lines are affected by the SNR's complex structure and its projection onto the plane of the sky because the escaping line luminosity can be reduced by 10 -- 80\% due to absorption along the line-of-sight. Additionally, the subtraction of contaminating background radiation is required for the correct classification of an SNR on the oxygen or sulphur BPT diagrams. The electron temperature and density obtained from our synthetic observations match well with the simulation but are very sensitive to the assumed metallicity.