The Effects of General Relativity on Core Collapse Supernovae

Abstract

The effects of general relativity (GR) on the hydrodynamics and neutrino transport are examined during the critical shock reheating phase of core collapse supernovae. We find that core collapse computed with GR hydrodynamics results in a substantially more compact core structure out to the shock, the shock radius at stagnation being reduced by a factor of 2. The inflow speed of material behind the shock is also increased by a factor of 2 throughout most of the evolution. We have developed a code for general relativistic multigroup flux-limited diffusion (MGFLD) in static spacetimes and compared the steady-state neutrino distributions for selected time slices of post-bounce models with those computed with Newtonian MGFLD. The GR transport calculations show the expected reductions in neutrino luminosities and rms energies from redshift and curvature effects. Although the effects of GR on the hydrodynamics and neutrino transport seem to work against shock revival, the core configurations are sufficiently different that no firm conclusions can be drawn, except that simulations of core collapse supernovae using Newtonian hydrodynamics and transport are not realistic.