Measuring the distance and mass of galactic core-collapse supernovae using neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that current and upcoming neutrino detectors can rapidly estimate the distance and progenitor mass of galactic supernovae, aiding electromagnetic follow-up observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel calculation method to quickly predict supernova progenitor distance and mass constraints using neutrino data.

Findings

Distance can be constrained within ~5% uncertainty.

Neutrino detectors can estimate progenitor mass for extremal compactness values.

Method enables rapid follow-up planning for supernova observations.

Abstract

Neutrinos from a Galactic core-collapse supernova will be measured by neutrino detectors minutes to days before an optical signal reaches Earth. We present a novel calculation showing the ability of current and near-future neutrino detectors to make fast predictions of the progenitor distance and place constraints on the zero-age main sequence mass in order to inform the observing strategy for electromagnetic follow-up. We show that for typical Galactic supernovae, the distance can be constrained with an uncertainty of $\sim$5\% using IceCube or Hyper-K and, furthermore, the zero-age main sequence mass can be constrained for extremal values of compactness.