Ejecta Composition Effects on Kilonova Parameter Inference

ORAL

Abstract

Kilonovae, one source of electromagnetic emission associated with neutron star mergers, are powered by the decay of radioactive isotopes in the neutron-rich merger ejecta. Variations in the elemental composition of the merger ejecta will affect the electromagnetic emission of a given kilonova and thus influence the model parameters inferred from such an event. In this work, we present an analysis comparing the mass-weighted elemental compositions of our radiative transfer simulations to the mass fractions of elements in the Sun. We explore how the overall abundance depends on the mass ejected through wind and dynamical mechanisms and identify those ejecta masses which best reproduce Solar abundances. We report the extent to which our parameter inference results depend on our assumed composition for the dynamical and wind ejecta and examine how the new results compare to previous work.

*ROS, MR and EMH acknowledge support from NSF AST 1909534. EMH is additionally supported by NASA through the Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51481.001. Part of this work was performed at Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF grant PHY-1607611 and in part by a grant from the Simons Foundation. CLF, CJF, OK, RW, and EAC were supported by the US Department of Energy through the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. 89233218CNA000001). Research presented in this article was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory under project number 20190021DR. This research used resources provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institutional Computing Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Contr

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Presenters

  • Marko Ristic

    • Rochester Institute of Technology

Authors

  • Marko Ristic

    • Rochester Institute of Technology

  • Erika M Holmbeck

    • Carnegie Observatories

  • Ryan Wollaeger

    • Los Alamos National Lab
    • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Oleg Korobkin

    • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Richard W O'Shaughnessy

    • Rochester Institute of Technology

  • Eve Chase

    • Los Alamos National Lab
    • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Chris Fryer

    • Los Alamos National Lab
    • Los Alamos Natl Lab
    • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Chris J Fontes

    • Los Alamos National Laboratory