Gone without a bang: An archival HST survey for disappearing massive stars

TL;DR

This study uses archival Hubble Space Telescope images to identify massive stars that have disappeared without bright supernovae, supporting the hypothesis that some massive stars collapse directly into black holes.

Contribution

It presents the first systematic analysis of HST archival data to find disappearing massive stars, providing observational evidence for optically dark core-collapse events.

Findings

Identified one candidate star that disappeared without a bright supernova.

Supports the existence of optically dark core-collapse in massive stars.

Demonstrates the feasibility of using archival HST data for such surveys.

Abstract

It has been argued that a substantial fraction of massive stars may end their lives without an optically bright supernova (SN), but rather collapse to form a black hole. Such an event would not be detected by current SN surveys, which are focused on finding bright transients. Kochanek et al. (2008) proposed a novel survey for such events, using repeated observations of nearby galaxies to search for the disappearance of a massive star. We present such a survey, using the first systematic analysis of archival Hubble Space Telescope images of nearby galaxies with the aim of identifying evolved massive stars which have disappeared, without an accompanying optically bright supernova. We consider a sample of 15 galaxies, with at least three epochs of Hubble Space Telescope imaging taken between 1994 and 2013. Within this data, we find one candidate which is consistent with a 25-30 solar mass yellow supergiant which has undergone an optically dark core-collapse.