Observational Constraints on the Progenitors of Core-Collapse Supernovae: The Case for Missing High-Mass Stars

By S. Smartt. Publications Astronomical Society of Australia, 2015

461 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Over the last 15 years, the supernova community has endeavoured to directly identify progenitor stars for core-collapse supernovae discovered in nearby galaxies. These precursors are often visible as resolved stars in high-resolution images from space-and ground-based telescopes. The discovery rate of progenitor stars is limited by the local supernova rate and the availability and depth of archive images of galaxies, with 18 detections of precursor objects and 27 upper limits. This review compiles these results (from 1999 to 2013) in a distance-limited sample and discusses the implications of the findings. The vast majority of the detections of progenitor stars are of type II-P, II-L, or IIb with one type Ib progenitor system detected and many more upper limits for progenitors of Ibc supernovae (14 in all). The data for these 45 supernovae progenitors illustrate a remarkable deficit of high-luminosity stars above an apparent limit of logL/L⊙ ≃ 5.1 dex. For a typical Salpeter initial mass function, one would expect to have found 13 high-luminosity and high-mass progenitors by now. There is, possibly, only one object in this time- and volume-limited sample that is unambiguously high-mass (the progenitor of SN2009ip) although the nature of that supernovae is still debated. The possible biases due to the influence of circumstellar dust, the luminosity analysis, and sample selection methods are reviewed. It does not appear likely that these can explain the missing high-mass progenitor stars. This review concludes that the community’s work to date shows that the observed populations of supernovae in the local Universe are not, on the whole, produced by high-mass (M ≳ 18 M⊙) stars. Theoretical explosions of model stars also predict that black hole formation and failed supernovae tend to occur above an initial mass of M ≃ 18 M⊙. The models also suggest there is no simple single mass division for neutron star or black-hole formation and that there are islands of explodability for stars in the 8–120 M⊙ range.The observational constraints are quite consistent with the bulk of stars above M ≳ 18 M⊙ collapsing to form black holes with no visible supernovae.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98653278721eb73fad6c0407703a1e57b661e41f

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Citations in the corpus

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( ): Convective Boundaries, Element Diffusion, and Massive Star Explosions (2017, background): “The resulting light curves of Type II supernovae can be subdivided into multiple classes, but we focus here on TypeIIP supernovae (e.g., Smartt 2009, 2015; Smith et al. 2016).”
The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives (2019, background): “First, there is a dearth of >18 M RSG SN progenitors—the “missing RSG problem” (Kochanek et al. 2008; Smartt et al. 2009; Horiuchi et al. 2014; Smartt 2015).”
The Status of Multi-Dimensional Core-Collapse Supernova Models (2016, background): “…these encouraging developments, several questions now need to be addressed to make further progress: What is the key to robust 3D explosion models across the entire progenitor mass range for which we observe explosions (i.e. at least up to 15 . . . 18M ; see Smartt et al. 2009 and Smartt 2015)?”
A High-resolution Study of Presupernova Core Structure (2017, result): “Above 18 M , the fraction of SN reduces 21 to only 8%, which actually is in a slightly better accord with the results from Smartt (2009, 2015), as compared to the previous study.”
The diversity of Type II supernova versus the similarity in their progenitors (2016, result): “This is consistent with progenitor studies using archival prediscovery images: SNe II likely come from progenitors in the range 8–16 M⊙ (Smartt et al. 2009; Smartt 2015).”
On the formation history of Galactic double neutron stars (2018, methodology): “We update the analytic SN models of Müller et al. (2016) by using a shock radius factor αturb = 1.18 and a compression ratio at the shock β = 3.2, which fit constraints on the progenitor masses of type IIP supernovae (Smartt 2015) slightly better than the original version.”
Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: Construction, Observational Verification, and New Results (2017, methodology): “For the observed datapoints, use the sample of Smartt (2015) supplemented by SNe 1987A (Walborn et al. 1987) and 1993J (Aldering, Humphreys, & Richmond 1994), as well as the recent ‘failed supernova’ event in NGC 6946 (Adams et al. 2017).”
CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE FROM 9 TO 120 SOLAR MASSES BASED ON NEUTRINO-POWERED EXPLOSIONS (2015, result): “The small value above 20 M compares much better than past surveys with the results of Smartt (2009, 2015), who place an upper limit on observational SNe of about 18 M .”
Presupernova Evolution and Explosive Nucleosynthesis of Rotating Massive Stars in the Metallicity Range −3 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ 0 (2018, background): “…mass exploding as SNIIP is compatible with the lack of detected progenitors (of SNIIP) with luminosities higher than log(L/Le)∼5.1, as reported by Smartt (2009, 2015), and therefore, our scenario naturally explains the so-called “RSG problem” (Smartt 2009) —note however that other hypotheses to…”
Very massive stars, pair-instability supernovae and intermediate-mass black holes with the sevn code (2017, unknown): “S R ] 1 9 Ju n SN explosion (see Smartt 2015 and references therein).”
A simple approach to the supernova progenitor–explosion connection (2016, background): “This is possible for plausible combinations of parameters, e.g. for α turb = 1.15 and β expl = 3, which gives a low upper mass limit for successful explosions in line with Smartt (2015) as shown by Fig.”
The mass spectrum of compact remnants from the parsec stellar evolution tracks (2015, background): “Recent studies have shown that the link between physical properties of the progenitor star, SN properties and mass of the compact remnant is far from being trivial (O’Connor & Ott 2011; Janka 2012; Ugliano et al. 2012; Sukhbold & Woosley 2014; Ertl et al. 2015; Smartt 2015).”