Neutrinos from Carbon-Burning Red Supergiants and Their Detectability

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential to detect MeV neutrinos emitted by red supergiants in the carbon-burning phase, assessing their flux, spectrum, and detection feasibility with current underground detectors, highlighting significant challenges.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed estimate of neutrino fluxes from carbon-burning RSGs and analyzes their detectability with existing detector technologies.

Findings

Neutrino flux from a nearby RSG could reach ~10^5 cm^-2s^-1.

Expected neutrino detection rate in Super-Kamiokande-like detectors is up to 50 events per year.

Background noise from radioactivity poses a major challenge for detection.

Abstract

Stars emit MeV neutrinos during their evolution via nuclear syntheses and thermal processes, and detecting them could provide insights into stellar structure beyond what is accessible through electromagnetic wave observations. So far, MeV neutrinos have been observed from the Sun and SN 1987A. It has been suggested that pre-supernova stars in the oxygen and silicon burning stages would emit enough MeV neutrinos to be detectable on Earth, provided they are in the local universe. In this study, we investigate the prospect of detecting neutrinos from red supergiants (RSGs) in the carbon-burning phase. In our Galaxy, around a thousand RSGs have been cataloged, and several are expected to be in the carbon-burning phase. We first calculate the luminosity and energy spectrum of neutrinos emitted during the post-main-sequence evolution of massive stars. For a nearby carbon-burning RSG located $\sim200$ pc away, we estimate the neutrino flux reaching Earth to be as large as $\sim10^5$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ with a spectrum peaking $\sim0.6$ MeV. We then assess the feasibility of detecting these neutrinos in underground facilities, particularly in hybrid detectors equipped with water-based liquid scintillator and ultra-fast photodetectors. In detectors with a volume comparable to Super-Kamiokande, for the above flux, we anticipate up to $\sim50$ neutrino events per year with directional information. Although this is a fair number, the number of events from radioactive backgrounds would be much larger. Our results indicate that studying neutrinos from carbon-burning RSGs and predicting supernovae well in advance before their explosion would be challenging with currently available detector technologies.