Aspherical Supernova Shock Breakout and the Observations of Supernova 2008D

Shock breakout is the earliest, readily observable emission from a core-collapse supernova (SN) explosion. Observing SN shock breakout may yield information about the nature of the SN shock prior to exiting the progenitor and, in turn, about the core-collapse SN mechanism itself. X-ray outburst 080109, later associated with SN 2008D, is a very well-observed example of shock breakout from a core-collapse SN. Despite excellent observational coverage and detailed modeling, fundamental information about the shock breakout, such as the radius of breakout and driver of the light curve timescale, is still uncertain. The models constructed for explaining the shock breakout emission from SN 2008D all assume spherical symmetry. We present a study of the observational characteristics of aspherical shock breakout from stripped-envelope core-collapse SNe surrounded by a wind. We conduct two-dimensional, jet-driven SN simulations from stripped-envelope progenitors and calculate the resulting shock breakout X-ray spectra and light curves. The X-ray spectra evolve significantly in time as the shocks expand outward and are not fit well by single-temperature and radius blackbodies. The timescale of the X-ray burst light curve of the shock breakout is related to the shock crossing time of the progenitor, and not to the much shorter light crossing time that sets the light curve timescale in spherical breakouts. This could explain the long shock breakout light curve timescale observed for XRO 080109/SN 2008D. We also comment on the distribution of intermediate-mass elements in asymmetric explosions.