English

The initial mass-remnant mass relation for core collapse supernovae

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-03-12 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015 marked the beginning of a new era for the study of compact objects. Upcoming detectors, such as the Einstein Telescope, are expected to add thousands of binary coalescences to the list. However, from a theoretical perspective, our understanding of compact objects is hindered by many uncertainties, and a comprehensive study of the nature of stellar remnants from core-collapse supernovae is still lacking. In this work, we investigate the properties of stellar remnants using a homogeneous grid of rotating and non-rotating massive stars at various metallicities from Limongi and Chieffi 2018. We simulate the supernova explosion of the evolved progenitors using the HYdrodynamic Ppm Explosion with Radiation diffusION (HYPERION) code (Limongi and Chieffi 2020), assuming a thermal bomb model calibrated to match the main properties of SN1987A. We find that the heaviest black hole that can form depends on the initial stellar rotation, metallicity, and the assumed criterion for the onset of pulsational pair-instability supernovae. Non-rotating progenitors at [Fe/H]=3\big[\rm Fe/H \big]=-3 can form black holes up to 87M\sim 87 M_\odot, falling within the theorized pair-instability mass gap. Conversely, enhanced wind mass loss prevents the formation of BHs more massive than 41.6M\sim 41.6 M_\odot from rotating progenitors. We use our results to study the black hole mass distribution from a population of 10610^6 isolated massive stars following a Kroupa initial mass function. Finally, we provide fitting formulas to compute the mass of compact remnants as a function of stellar progenitor properties. Our up-to-date prescriptions can be easily implemented in rapid population synthesis codes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.18689,
  title  = {The initial mass-remnant mass relation for core collapse supernovae},
  author = {C. Ugolini and M. Limongi and R. Schneider and A. Chieffi and U. N. Di Carlo and M. Spera},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18689},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication on A&A. 25 pages, 24 figures, 6 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:26:28.462Z