On `On the Red Supergiant Problem': a rebuttal, and a consensus on the upper mass cutoff for II-P progenitors

Abstract

The `Red Supergiant Problem' describes the claim that the brightest Red Supergiant (RSG) progenitors to type II-P supernovae are significantly fainter than RSGs in the field. This mismatch has been interpreted by several authors as being a manifestation of the mass threshold for the production of black holes (BHs), such that stars with initial masses above a cutoff of $M_{\mathrm{hi}}=17$M${}_{\odot }$ and below 25$M_{\odot }$ will die as RSGs, but with no visible SN explosion as the BH is formed. However, we have previously cautioned that this cutoff is more likely to be higher and has large uncertainties ($M_{\mathrm{hi}}=19_{-2}^{+4}{M}_{\odot }$), meaning that the statistical significance of the RSG Problem is less than $2\sigma$. Recently, Kochanek (2020) has claimed that our work is statistically flawed, and with their analysis has argued that the upper mass cutoff is as low as $M_{\mathrm{hi}}=15.7\pm 0.8M_{\odot }$, giving the RSG Problem a significance of $>10\sigma$. In this letter, we show that Kochanek's low cutoff is caused by a statistical misinterpretation, and the associated fit to the progenitor mass spectrum can be ruled out at the 99.6\% confidence level. Once this problem is remedied, Kochanek's best fit becomes $M_{\mathrm{hi}}=19_{-2}^{+4}{M}_{\odot }$, in excellent agreement with our work. Finally, we argue that, in the search for a RSG `vanishing' as it collapses directly to a BH, any such survey would have to operate for decades before the absence of any such detection became statistically significant.

5 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• The death of massive stars - I. Observational constraints on the progenitors of type II-P supernovae
• The Initial Masses of the Red Supergiant Progenitors to Type-II Supernovae
• The `Red Supergiant Problem': the upper luminosity boundary of type-II supernova progenitors
• The red supergiant and supernova rate problems: implications for core-collapse supernova physics

Cited by in corpus (14)

• A Luminous Red Supergiant and Dusty Long-period Variable Progenitor for SN 2023ixf
• Towards Probing the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background in All Flavors
• Synthetic red supergiant explosion model grid for systematic characterization of Type II supernovae
• Nothing to see here: Failed supernovae are faint or rare
• Identifying the SN 2022acko progenitor with JWST
• Non-Universal Stellar Initial Mass Functions: Large Uncertainties in Star Formation Rates at $z\approx 2-4$ and Other Astrophysical Probes
• SN 2018gj: A Short-plateau Type II Supernova with Persistent Blue-shifted H-alpha Emission
• The landscape of binary core-collapse supernova progenitors and the late emergence of Wolf-Rayet winds
• Luminous Type II Short-Plateau SN 2023ufx: Asymmetric Explosion of a Partially-Stripped Massive Progenitor
• Red supergiant stars in binary systems. I. Identification and characterisation in the Small Magellanic Cloud from the UVIT ultraviolet imaging survey
• Observations and Spectral Modelling of the Narrow-Lined Type Ic SN 2017ein
• Stellar evolution through the Red Supergiant phase
• Neutrinos from Diffuse Supernova Background
• Weak Mass Loss from the Red Supergiant Progenitor of the Type II SN 2021yja