The Progenitor of the Vela Pulsar

Abstract

With Gaia parallaxes it is possible to study the stellar populations associated with individual Galactic supernova remnants (SNR) to estimate the mass of the exploding star. Here we analyze the luminous stars near the Vela pulsar and SNR to find that its progenitor was probably (>90%) low mass (8.1-10.3Msun). The presence of the O star gamma2 Vel a little over 100 pc from Vela is the primary ambiguity, as including it in the analysis volume significantly increases the probability (to 5%) of higher mass (>20Msun) progenitors. However, to be a high mass star associated with gamma2 Vel's star cluster at birth, the progenitor would have to a runaway star from an unbound binary with an unusually high velocity. The primary impediment to analyzing large numbers of Galactic SNRs in this manner is the lack of accurate distances. This can likely be solved by searching for absorption lines from the SNR in stars as a function of distance, a method which yielded a distance to Vela in agreement with the direct pulsar parallax. If Vela was a 10Msun supernova in an external galaxy, the 50 pc search region used in extragalactic studies would contain only ~10% of the stars formed in a 50~pc region around the progenitor at birth and ~90% of the stars in the search region would have been elsewhere.

submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (23)

• The Gaia mission
• A grid of MARCS model atmospheres for late-type stars I. Methods and general properties
• Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: construction, observational verification and new results
• The death of massive stars - I. Observational constraints on the progenitors of type II-P supernovae
• Observational constraints on the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae : the case for missing high mass stars
• On the mass-to-light ratio of the local Galactic disc and the optical luminosity of the Galaxy
• The Landscape of the Neutrino Mechanism of Core-Collapse Supernovae: Neutron Star and Black Hole Mass Functions, Explosion Energies and Nickel Yields
• On Pulsar Distance Measurements and their Uncertainties
• A new mass-loss rate prescription for red supergiants
• The Search for Failed Supernovae with The Large Binocular Telescope: First Candidates
• Constraining the thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch phase with resolved stellar populations in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• HESS J0632+057 : A new gamma-ray binary?
• The Stellar Ancestry of Supernovae in the Magellanic Clouds - I. the Most Recent Supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• The `Red Supergiant Problem': the upper luminosity boundary of type-II supernova progenitors
• γ^2 Velorum: Orbital Solution and Fundamental Parameter Determination with SUSI
• A Cool and Inflated Progenitor Candidate for the Type Ib Supernova 2019yvr at 2.6 Years Before Explosion
• The Origin and Motion of PSR J0538+2817 in S147
• The Supernova Progenitor Mass Distributions of M31 and M33: Further Evidence for an Upper Mass Limit
• The Uncertain Masses of Progenitors of Core Collapse Supernovae and Direct Collapse Black Holes
• PUSHing core-collapse supernovae to explosions in spherical symmetry V: Equation of state dependency of explosion properties, nucleosynthesis yields, and compact remnants
• Supernovae Producing Unbound Binaries and Triples
• On the Progenitor of the Type Ic Supernova 2012fh
• Rapid stellar and binary population synthesis with COMPAS

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Cool, Luminous, and Highly Variable Stars in the Magellanic Clouds. II: Spectroscopic and Environmental Analysis of Thorne-Żytkow Object and Super-AGB Star Candidates