Type IIP Supernova Progenitors II: Stellar Mass and Obscuration by the Dust in the Circumstellar Medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dust obscuration affects the apparent luminosity and inferred progenitor mass of red supergiant stars leading to Type IIP supernovae, highlighting potential misestimations due to circumstellar dust.

Contribution

It models pre-supernova characteristics of different progenitor masses using MESA, showing that high circumstellar extinction can obscure true luminosities, impacting mass estimates.

Findings

High circumstellar extinction (A_V ~ 3) is inconsistent with observed magnitudes for 26 M_sun progenitors.

Lower mass (13 M_sun) models fit observed data without requiring excessive dust obscuration.

Luminosity variations in 26 M_sun models could be detected with high-cadence, multi-band observations.

Abstract

It has been well established from a variety of observations that red supergiants (RSGs) loose a lot of mass in stellar wind. Dust formed in this emitted gas over a few decades before core-collapse can lead to substantial extinction and obscure the intrinsic luminosity of the progenitor RSG. This may lead to a difficulty in determining the range of progenitor masses that lead to the different classes of supernovae. Even the nearby, well studied supernovae with pre-explosion observations, such as SN 2013ej may suffer from this uncertainty in the progenitor mass. We explore here two different masses proposed for its progenitor. We compute their pre-supernova characteristics using Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). We show that a non-rotating star with the initial mass of 26 M$_{\odot}$ would require a considerable amount of circum-stellar medium (A$_V \sim$ 3) to obscure its high luminosity given the observed pre-explosion magnitudes detected by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Such a high value of visual extinction appears to be inconsistent with that derived for SN 2013ej as well as SN 2003gd in the same host galaxy M74. In contrast, the evolutionary models of lower mass (13 M$_{\odot}$) star are easily accommodated within the observed HST magnitudes. Some of the 26 M$_{\odot}$ simulations show luminosity variation in the last few years which could be discriminated by high cadence and multi-band monitoring of supernova candidates in nearby galaxies. We demonstrate that our calculations are well-resolved with adequate zoning and evolutionary time-steps.