Based on our multi-dimensional neutrino-radiation hydrodynamic simulations, we report several cutting-edge issues about the long-veiled explosion mechanism of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe). In this contribution, we pay particular attention to whether three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics and/or general relativity (GR) would or would not help the onset of explosions. Our results from the first generation of full GR 3D simulations including approximate neutrino transport are quite optimistic, indicating that both of the two ingredients can foster neutrino-driven explosions. We give an outlook with a summary of the most urgent tasks to draw a robust conclusion to our findings.

Massive stars end their life with the gravitational collapse of their core and the formation of a neutron star. Their explosion as a supernova depends on the revival of a spherical accretion shock, located in the inner 200km and stalled during a few hundred milliseconds. Numerical simulations suggest that the large scale asymmetry of the neutrino-driven explosion is induced by a hydrodynamical instability named SASI. Its non radial character is able to influence the kick and the spin of the resulting neutron star. The SWASI experiment is a simple shallow water analog of SASI, where the role of acoustic waves and shocks is played by surface waves and hydraulic jumps. Distances in the experiment are scaled down by a factor one million, and time is slower by a factor one hundred. This experiment is designed to illustrate the asymmetric nature of core-collapse supernova.

Studying a multi-dimensional structure of supernovae (SNe) gives important constraints on the mechanism of the SN explosion. Polarization measurement is one of the most powerful methods to study the explosion geometry of extragalactic SNe. Especially, Type Ib/c SNe are the ideal targets because the core of the explosion is bare. We have performed spectropolarimetric observations of Type Ib/c SNe with the Subaru telescope. We detect a rotation of the polarization angle across the line, which is seen as a loop in the Q - U plane. This indicates that axisymmetry is broken in the SN ejecta. Adding our new data to the sample of stripped-envelope SNe with high-quality spectropolarimetric data, five SNe out of six show a loop in the Q - U plane. This implies that the SN explosion commonly has a non-axisymmetric, three-dimensional geometry.

Gamma-Ray Bursts are likely associated with a catastrophic energy release in stellar mass objects. Electromagnetic observations provide important, but indirect information on the progenitor. On the other hand, gravitational waves emitted from the central source, carry direct information on its nature. In this context, I give an overview of the multi-messenger study of gamma-ray bursts that can be carried out by using electromagnetic and gravitational wave observations. I also underline the importance of joint electromagnetic and gravitational wave searches, in the absence of a gamma-ray trigger. Finally, I discuss how multi-messenger observations may probe alternative gamma-ray burst progenitor models, such as the magnetar scenario.

We perform a set of neutrino-driven core-collapse supernova (CCSN) simulations studying the hydrodynamical neutron star kick mechanism in three-dimensions. Our simulations produce neutron star (NS) kick velocities in a range between ~100-600 km/s resulting mainly from the anisotropic gravitational tug by the asymmetric mass distribution behind the supernova shock. This stochastic kick mechanism suggests that a NS kick velocity of more than 1000 km/s may as well be possible. An enhanced production of heavy elements in the direction roughly opposite to the NS recoil direction is also observed as a result of the asymmetric explosion. This large scale asymmetry might be detectable and can be used to constrain the NS kick mechanism.

The collapse of massive rotating stellar cores and the associated accretion is thought to power long GRBs. The physical scale and dynamics of the accretion disk are initially set by the angular momentum distribution in the progenitor, and the physical conditions make neutrino emission the main cooling agent in the flow. We have carried out an initial set of calculations of the collapse of rotating polytropic cores in three dimensions, making use of a pseudo-relativistic potential and a simplified cooling prescription. We focus on the effects of self gravity and cooling on the overall morphology and evolution of the flow for a given rotation rate in the context of the collapsar model. For the typical cooling times expected in such a scenario we observe the appearance of strong instabilities on a time scale, tcool, following disk formation. Such instabilities and their gravitational interaction with the black hole (BH) produce significant variability in the energy loss and accretion rates, which would translate into neutrino cooling variations when a more realistic neutrino cooling scheme is implemented in future work.

We present photometry and spectroscopy of the peculiar Type II supernova SN 2010jp, also named PTF10aaxi. The light curve exhibits a linear decline with a relatively low peak absolute magnitude of only −15.9 (unfiltered), and a low radioactive decay luminosity at late times that suggests a low synthesized nickel mass of about 0.003 M⊙ or less. Spectra of SN 2010jp display an unprecedented triple-peaked Hα line profile, showing: (1) a narrow central component that suggests shock interaction with a dense circumstellar medium (CSM); (2) high-velocity blue and red emission features centered at −12,600 and +15,400 km s−1; and (3) very broad wings extending from −22,000 to +25,000 km s−1. We propose that this line profile indicates a bipolar jet-driven explosion, with the central component produced by normal SN ejecta and CSM interaction at mid and low latitudes, while the high-velocity bumps and broad line wings arise in a nonrelativistic bipolar jet. Jet-driven SNe II are predicted for collapsars resulting from a wide range of initial masses above 25 M⊙, especially at the sub-solar metallicity consistent with the SN host environment. It also seems consistent with the apparently low 56Ni mass that may accompany black hole formation. We speculate that the jet survives to produce observable signatures because the star's H envelope was very low mass, having been mostly stripped away by the previous eruptive mass loss.

Host galaxies are an excellent means of probing the natal environments that generate gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Recent work on the host galaxies of short-duration GRBs has offered new insights into the parent stellar populations and ages of their enigmatic progenitors. Similarly, surveys of long-duration GRB (LGRB) host environments and their ISM properties have produced intriguing new results with important implications for long GRB progenitor models. These host studies are also critical in evaluating the utility of LGRBs as potential tracers of star formation and metallicity at high redshifts. I will summarize the latest research on LGRB host galaxies, and discuss the resulting impact on our understanding of these events' progenitors, energetics, and cosmological applications.

The repository of GRB (gamma-ray burst) observations made by the Swift X-ray Telescope, now consisting of over 650 bursts, is a valuable and unique resource for the study of GRB X-ray emission. The observed soft X-ray spectrum typically arises from an underlying power law continuum, absorbed by gas along the line-of-sight. However, particularly at early times in a burst's evolution the continuum emission is not always understood and may comprise multiple components including thermal emission unexpected in the standard model. A thermal X-ray component has been discovered in two very unusual GRBs, perhaps suggesting an association only with this subset of events. However, evidence exists for thermal emission from more typical examples and here we present a new discovery of one such case and describe a systematic search for thermal components among all early GRB X-ray spectra.

We present constraints on core-collapse supernova progenitors through observations of their environments within host galaxies. This is achieved through 2 routes. Firstly, we investigate the spatial correlation of supernovae with host galaxy star formation using pixel statistics. We find that the main supernova types form a sequence of increasing association to star formation. The most logical interpretation is that this implies an increasing progenitor mass sequence going from the supernova type Ia arising from the lowest mass, through the type II, type Ib, and the supernova type Ic arising from the highest mass progenitors. We find the surprising result that the supernova type IIn show a lower association to star formation than type IIPs, implying lower mass progenitors. Secondly, we use host HII region spectroscopy to investigate differences in environment metallicity between different core-collapse types. We find that supernovae of types Ibc arise in slightly higher metallicity environments than type II events. However, this difference is not significant, implying that progenitor metallicity does not play a dominant role in deciding supernova type.

We present the results from our Swift/VLT legacy survey, a VLT Large Programme aimed at characterizing the host galaxies of a homogeneously selected sample of Swift gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The immediate goals are to determine the host luminosity function, study the effects of reddening, determine the fraction of Lyα emitters in the hosts, and obtain redshifts for targets without a reported one. We have carefully selected a sample, obeying strict and well-defined criteria: 69 targets in total. Among the results is a large optical detection rate, the lack of extremely red objects (only one possible case in the sample), and 15 new GRB redshifts with the mean redshift of the host sample assessed to be 〈z〉 ≳ 2.2.

The locations of long GRBs and stripped supernovae are compared to those of their favored progenitors, WR stars, and their sub-classes. Compared to Leloudas et al. (2010), we have doubled the number of galaxies with suitable WR data. In the combined sample, WC stars are found, on average, in brighter locations than WN stars. The WN distribution is fully consistent with the one of SNe Ib, while it is inconsistent with those of SNe II, Ic and GRBs. The WC distribution is both consistent with SNe Ib and Ic. It is inconsistent with SNe II, and marginally consistent with GRBs. Furthermore, we present a spectroscopic study of the locations of SNe Ib/c. The average metallicity in the environments of SNe Ic is found to be a little higher than for SNe Ib, but the difference is small and not significant within our sample. Under the assumption that the SN regions were formed in an instantaneous burst of star formation, we find that a fraction of them appear older than what is allowed in order to host SNe Ib/c from single massive stars. Within this framework, these SNe must come from lower mass binaries.

The immensely bright and intrinsically simple afterglow spectra of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have proven to be highly effective probes of the interstellar dust and gas in distant, star-forming galaxies. Despite significant progress, many aspects of the host galaxy attenuating material are still poorly understood. There is considerable discrepancy between the amount of X-ray and optical afterglow absorption, with the former typically an order of magnitude higher than what would be expected from the optical line absorption of neutral element species. Similar inconsistencies exist between the abundance of interstellar dust derived from spectroscopic and photometric data, and the relation between the line-of-sight and integrated host galaxy interstellar medium (ISM) remains unclear. In these proceedings we present our analysis on both spectroscopic and photometric multi-wavelength GRB afterglow data, and summarise some of the more recent results on the attenuation properties of the ISM within GRB host galaxies.

While the connection between Long Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Type Ib/c Supernovae (SNe Ib/c) from stripped stars has been well-established, one key outstanding question is what conditions and factors lead to each kind of explosion in massive stripped stars. One promising line of attack is to investigate what sets apart SNe Ib/c with GRBs from those without GRBs. Here, I briefly present two observational studies that probe the SN properties and the environmental metallicities of SNe Ib/c (specifically broad-lined SNe Ic) with and without GRBs. I present an analysis of expansion velocities based on published spectra and on the homogeneous spectroscopic CfA data set of over 70 SNe of Types IIb, Ib, Ic and Ic-bl, which triples the world supply of well-observed Stripped SNe. Moreover, I demonstrate that a meta-analysis of the three published SN 1b/c metallicity data sets when including only values at the SN positions to probe natal oxygen abundances, indicates at very high significance that indeed SNe Ic erupt from more metal-rich environments than SNe Ib, while SNe Ic-bl with GRBs still prefer, on average, more metal-poor sites than those without GRBs.

The galaxies hosting the most energetic explosions in the universe, the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), are generally found to be low-mass, metal-poor, blue and star forming. However, the majority of the targets investigated so far (less than 100) are at relatively low redshift, z < 2. We know that at low redshift, the cosmic star formation is predominantly in small galaxies. Therefore, at low redshift, long-duration GRBs, which are associated with massive stars, are expected to be in small galaxies. Preliminary investigations of the stellar mass function of z < 1.5 GRB hosts does not indicate that these galaxies are different from the general population of nearby star-forming galaxies. At high-z, it is still unclear whether GRB hosts are different. Recent results indicate that a fraction of them might be in dusty regions of massive galaxies. Remarkable is the a super-solar metallicity measured in the interstellar medium of a z = 3.57 GRB host.

In low-metallicity environments, massive stars are more easily formed than in the solar neighborhood. In this article, we see the following examples of low-mass star formation. We first describe the first star formation in the universe and argue that they are typically ordinary-sized massive stars, rather than very massive (> 100M⊙) ones. Next, we see how the metal-enrichment changes the thermal evolution of gas, thereby causing the shift of characteristic stellar mass towards lower mass. Finally, we discuss the possibility of forming supermassive stars in some special conditions in young galaxies.

There has been great progress in recent years in discovering star forming galaxies at high redshifts (z > 5), close to the epoch of reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM). The WFC3 and ACS cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope have enabled Lyman break galaxies to be robustly identified, but the UV luminosity function and star formation rate density of this population at z = 6 − 8 seems to be much lower than at z = 2 − 4. High escape fractions and a large contribution from faint galaxies below our current detection limits would be required for star-forming galaxies to reionize the Universe. We have also found that these galaxies have blue rest-frame UV colours, which might indicate lower dust extinction at z > 5. There has been some spectroscopic confirmation of these Lyman break galaxies through Lyman-α emission, but the fraction of galaxies where we see this line drops at z > 7, perhaps due to the onset of the Gunn-Peterson effect (where the IGM is opaque to Lyman-α).

It has been suggested that the apparent bias of long-duration GRBs (LGRBs) to low metallicity environments might be a result of the fact that star-formation is anti-correlated with metallicity. However, if this were the cause, one would expect other indicators of star formation, such as Type II and Type Ic SNe to demonstrate a similar bias. Here we show that local Type Ic and Type II SNe track the star-formation weighted metallicity distribution of the SDSS galaxies. In contrast LGRBs are typically found at far-lower metallicities than would be expected based on the distribution of star-formation. This is true even when one takes into account so-called “dark bursts”. Indeed, while we will present data that show that some LGRBs form at very high metallicities, these objects enter the sample because of the large effective search volume produced by their bright hosts. The bias of LGRBs to low metallicity is real and must be related to a mechanism which is crucial in their formation.

We investigate explosive nucleosynthesis during neutrino-driven, aspherical supernova (SN) explosion aided by standing accretion shock instability (SASI), based on two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the explosion of 11, 15, 20, 25, 30 and 40M⊙ stars with zero metallicity. The magnitude and asymmetry of the explosion energy are estimated with simulations, for a given set of neutrino luminosities and temperatures, not as in the previous study in which the explosion is manually and spherically initiated by means of a thermal bomb or a piston and also some artificial mixing procedures are applied for the estimate of abundances of the SN ejecta.

By post-processing calculations with a large nuclear reaction network, we have evaluated abundances and masses of ejecta from the aspherical SNe. We find that matter mixing induced via SASI is important for the abundant production of nuclei with atomic number ≥ 21, in particular Sc, which is underproduced in the spherical models without artificial mixing. We also find that the IMF-averaged abundances are similar to those observed in extremely metal poor stars. However, observed [K/Fe] cannot be reproduced with our aspherical SN models.

The status and prospects for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as cosmological probes are reviewed. Long duration GRBs can potentially be used as an indicator of star formation rate (SFR), though GRB rate might be systematically different from SFR, by the effect of e.g. metallicity. There are several papers claiming that the cosmic GRB rate history is different from that of SFR in the sense that GRB rate is relatively higher than SFR at higher redshifts, which may be explained by the metallicity effect. However, considering the large uncertainties about the efficiency of GRB afterglow detection and redshift determination, it would be conservative to state that the observed GRB rate is roughly consistent with the star formation history. GRBs can also be used as a unique and powerful tool to reveal the reionization history. However, there is practically no progress in this direction since the first GRB-based useful constraint on reionization in 2005 (GRB 050904). The bottleneck now is the insufficient sensitivity of near-infrared spectroscopy, even with 8m class telescopes. The planned 30m class telescopes will bring the next breakthruough. Finally, GRBs can potentially be used as a standard candle to study cosmology by a geometrical test. However, there are still many steps for GRBs to overcome before it produces a result that has strong impact on the cosmology community in the precision cosmology era.