Inferring Type II-P Supernova Progenitor Masses from Plateau Luminosities
Abstract
Connecting observations of core-collapse supernova explosions to the properties of their massive star progenitors is a long-sought, and challenging, goal of supernova science. Recently, Barker et al. presented bolometric light curves for a landscape of progenitors from spherically symmetric neutrino-driven core-collapse supernova (CCSN) simulations using an effective model. They find a tight relationship between the plateau luminosity of the Type II-P CCSN light curve and the terminal iron-core mass of the progenitor. Remarkably, this allows us to constrain progenitor properties with photometry alone. We analyze a large observational sample of Type II-P CCSN light curves and estimate a distribution of iron-core masses using the relationship of Barker et al. The inferred distribution matches extremely well with the distribution of iron-core masses from stellar evolutionary models and namely, contains high-mass iron cores that suggest contributions from very massive progenitors in the observational data. We use this distribution of iron-core masses to infer minimum and maximum masses of progenitors in the observational data. Using Bayesian inference methods to locate optimal initial mass function parameters, we find ${M}_{\min }={9.8}_{-0.27}^{+0.37}$ and ${M}_{\max }={24.0}_{-1.9}^{+3.9}$ solar masses for the observational data.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- February 2023
- DOI:
- 10.3847/2041-8213/acb052
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2211.05789
- Bibcode:
- 2023ApJ...944L...2B
- Keywords:
-
- Core-collapse supernovae;
- Supernovae;
- Type II supernovae;
- Hydrodynamical simulations;
- Astronomical simulations;
- Radiative transfer;
- Red supergiant stars;
- Stellar mass functions;
- Stellar masses;
- 304;
- 1668;
- 1731;
- 767;
- 1857;
- 1335;
- 1375;
- 1612;
- 1614;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Accepted to ApJ Letters. 9 pages, 4 figures