Synthetic Spectrum Calculations of the Type II Supernova SN 87A

Hydrodynamic calculations of Type II supernova (SNII) explosions have been highly successful at reproducting the major observational properties of these events, particularly in the case of SN87A (e.g. [l], [2], [3]) Basic properties which can be determined from the data, such as the gas velocity and the bolometric luminosity are reasonably well fit by the hydrodynamic models. What makes these calculations feasible however is a compromise treatment of details concerning the radiation field. Most hydro codes treat the radiation transport by a simple flux limited radiative diffusion scheme and use a Lagrangian mass grid which is too course to yield up more than crude information on details of the emergent spectrum. Ultraviolet, optical and infrared spectrophotometry of supernovae are pregnant with information about their source, but in order to decipher most of this information it is first necessary to perform more refined calculations of the gas excitation/ionization and the radiation field structure in the photospheric and overlying layers.