Supernovae Remnants and Their Interaction with External Agents in the Laboratory: How It Structure the ISM udy Material Properties of Laser-Compressed Matter

Over the past two decades, high-power laser facilities have advanced our understanding of physical processes occurring in the Universe through a relatively new field: laboratory astrophysics. Conventional techniques such as numerical simulations and astronomical observations are unable to tackle some astrophysical challenges. For these reasons, scaled experiments are useful to investigate the microphysics involved in long-range astrophysical systems. Since recently, the coupling between high power lasers and high external magnetic field [1] authorize us to study, at smaller scale in the laboratory, the processes associated with magnetized astrophysical systems [2].

One of the astrophysical systems that can be tackle in the laboratory, is related to one of the most energetic phenomena occurring in the Universe: the explosion of stars. Several questions, regarding the interaction of SNR with surrounded environments (circumstellar and interstellar medium, magnetic fields, molecular clouds, …), still remain unsolved.

We studied different phases of supernovae explosions trying to mimick the astrophysical situation in the laboratory. In particular we study the deceleration of a radiative shock when interacting with the circumstellar medium that allowed us to give new insights in the hotspot dynamics of SN1987A [3]. This, at the early stage of the SNR, but also the interaction of the SNR with the ISM, can generate instabilities (RT, RM, KH) which turns into turbulence, that are extremely important to take into account to evaluate the mixing between the material of the SNR and the ISM/molecular/circumstellar cloud. We will see how to study these specific problems in the laboratory [4, 5]

On larger scale, SNR can interact with a variety of astrophysical objects, which leads to different processes. The first one is when a SNR interacts with another one (see DEML316). Is it a favorable environment for particle acceleration? Another one is its interaction with a molecular cloud. Can it triggers star formation? We will see how such complex environment can be mimicked in the laboratory and studied to answer to the above questions [6, 7].  

Finally, in some conditions SNRs exhibit unusual behavior: axisymmetric or barrel shape such as G296.5+10.0. We will see that in the presence of an external B-field, the blast wave exhibits a spheroidal shape, whose major axis is aligned with the magnetic field, in addition to a more continuous shock front [8].

In this talk, I will present and discuss all these results comparing to magneto-radiative hydrodynamic simulations performed with the FLASH code.

REFERENCES

[1] B. Albertazzi et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum (2013)
[2] B. Albertazzi et al., Science (2014)
[3] Th. Michel et al., Astrophys. J. (2019)
[4] G. Rigon et al., Phys. Rev. E (2019)
[5] G. Rigon et al., Nat. Comm. (2021)
[6] B. Albertazzi et al., Phys. Plasmas (2020)
[7] B. Albertazzi et al., Matter and Radiation at Extremes (2022)
[8] P. Mabey et al., Astrophys. J. (2020)