The aim of this study is to investigate the accretion of matter onto a compact gravitating remnant (neutron star) in the central region of the expanding shell of a Type II supernova. Computations of an explosion with the energetics of a Type II supernova have been performed to derive the structure of matter in the vicinity of the neutron star. The energy of the expanding shell and the parameters of the presupernova correspond to the known values for SN 1987A. This accretion leads to the formation of a layer of fairly dense and hot gas at the surface of the compact remnant, providing the conditions for nucleosynthesis reactions. Thus, one result of the study is to demonstrate the importance of the r and rbc processes, or explosive nucleosynthesis, in the compact envelope of a neutron star. A second result is the production of emission lines from unstable elements formed in the central part of the neutron-star envelope.

The problem of nucleosynthesis was studied within an aspherical supernova model. The explosive burning was computed in a star of 25 M-circle dot initial mass on its final stage of evolution. The chemical composition of a presupernova was taken from realistic evolutionary computations. A piecewise parabolic method on a local stencil was applied to simulate the hydrodynamics of the explosion. The gravity was recomputed by a Poisson solver on a fine grid as the explosion developed. A detailed yield of chemical elements was performed as a post-processing step using the tracer particles method. The produced nuclei formed a layer-like structure enclosing large fragments of nickel and iron-group isotopes that were pushed away from the central region by an explosion along the polar direction. The light nuclei were preferentially moving along the equatorial plane forming a torus-like structure.

Modern theoretical models predict that massive stars with masses within the 100-250 M0 range can produce pair-instability supernovae (PISNe) . Since the first stars of the Universe are believed to be very massive, these supernovae should play a significant role in the early stages of its history. But these stars represent the last unobserved population, owing to detection limits of current telescopes. We present an analysis of pair-instability supernovae explosions using various numerical codes. We discuss a possible connection of PISNe with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and explanation of some properties of GRB in this framework.