Inferring Type II-P Supernova Progenitor Masses from Plateau Luminosities

TL;DR

This study links supernova plateau luminosities to progenitor star masses, enabling mass estimates from photometry, and infers progenitor mass ranges consistent with stellar evolution models.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate progenitor star masses from supernova light curves using a relationship from recent simulations, aligning observational data with stellar models.

Findings

Progenitor mass range estimated as 9.8 to 24 solar masses.

Distribution of inferred iron core masses matches stellar evolution predictions.

High-mass progenitors contribute significantly to observed supernovae.

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. (2022) 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 2022. 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 mass of progenitors in the observational data. Using Bayesian inference methods to locate optimal initial mass function parameters, we find M$_{\mathrm{min}}=9.8^{+0.37}_{-0.27}$ and M$_{\mathrm{max}}=24.0^{+3.9}_{-1.9}$ solar masses for the observational data.