2012ApJ...752L...2C

A variety of supernova events, including Type IIn supernovae and ultraluminous supernovae, appear to have lost up to solar masses of their envelopes in tens to hundreds of years leading up to the explosion. In order to explain the close timing of the mass loss and supernova events, we explore the possibility that the mass loss is driven by common envelope evolution of a compact object (neutron star or black hole) in the envelope of a massive star and the supernova is triggered by the inspiral of the compact object to the central core of the companion star. The expected rate of such events is smaller than the observed rate of Type IIn supernovae but the rates may agree within the uncertainties. The mass loss velocity is related to the escape velocity from the common envelope system and is comparable to the observed velocity of hundreds of kilometers per second in Type IIn events. The mass loss is expected to be denser near the equatorial plane of the binary system and there is good evidence that the circumstellar media in Type IIn supernovae are asymmetric. Some of these supernova types show evidence for energies in excess of the canonical 10⁵¹ erg, which might be the result of explosions from rapid accretion onto a compact object through a disk.