On the Emergence of a New Instability during Core Collapse of Very Massive Stars

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Abstract The process of uniform supernovae (SNe) explosions is well investigated for all their types. However, observational data suggests that the SNe may be not spherically symmetric. Modern multidimensional simulations of SNe demonstrate development of hydrodynamical instabilities during the explosion phase. But the configuration of a star and inhomogeneities prior to explosion could strongly affect how the SN develops. A number of papers on numerical modeling of pair-instability SNe explosion considered the case when thermonuclear energy in the central region of a massive star is introduced by a series of several hot spots. It leads to the appearance of many fragments of hot matter behind the divergence shock wave. An observable manifestation of this may be the presence of peaks on light curves of gamma-ray bursts associated with explosions of massive stars. The physical nature of such inhomogeneities is not evident and the number and size of spots is conjecture. In this work, we study the possibility of formation of these inhomogeneities at the stage of core collapse (CC) in a massive star. To check this assumption, we chose an analytic self-similar model of CC and investigated the stability of solutions obtained from it with respect to small multidimensional perturbations. It shows there are no conditions where the collapse of a very massive star may remain stable, although, for a less massive star, it is possible. Using the relations obtained, we found characteristic features of developing instability, thereby making it possible to estimate the amount and characteristic size of the inhomogeneities.