Abstract
One explanation for the absence of higher mass red supergiants (16.5 Msun < M
< 25Msun) as the progenitors of Type IIP supernovae (SNe) is that they die in
failed SNe creating black holes. Simulations show that such failed SNe still
eject their hydrogen envelopes in a weak transient, leaving a black hole with
the mass of the star's helium core (5-8Msun). Here we show that this naturally
explains the typical masses of observed black holes and the gap between neutron
star and black hole masses without any fine-tuning of the SN mechanism beyond
having it fail in a mass range where many progenitor models have density
structures that make the explosions more likely to fail. There is no difficulty
including this \~20\% population of failed SNe in any accounting of SN types over
the progenitor mass function. And, other than patience, there is no
observational barrier to either detecting these black hole formation events or
limiting their rates to be well below this prediction.
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