Nothing to see here: Failed supernovae are faint or rare

Abstract

The absence of Type IIP core-collapse supernovae arising from progenitors above 17 solar masses suggests the existence of another evolutionary path by which massive stars end their lives. The direct collapse of a stellar core to a black hole without the production of a bright, explosive transient is expected to produce a long-lived, dim, red transient known as a failed supernova. Despite the detection of a number of candidates for disappearing massive stars in recent years, conclusive observational evidence for failed supernovae remains elusive. A custom-built pipeline designed for the detection of faint transients is used to re-analyse 10 years of observations of 231 nearby galaxies from the PTF/ZTF surveys. This analysis recovers known supernovae, and yields a number of interesting transients. However, none of these are consistent with a failed supernova. Through Monte Carlo tests the recovery efficiency of our pipeline is quantified. By assuming failed supernovae occur as a Poissonian process with zero detections in the data set, 95 per cent upper limits to the rate of failed supernovae are calculated as a function of failed supernova absolute magnitude. We estimate failed supernovae to be less than 0.61, 0.33, 0.26, or 0.23 of the core-collapse SN rate for absolute magnitudes of −11, −12, −13, and −14 respectively. Finally, we show that if they exist, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will find 1.7 -3.7 failed SNe per year for an absolute bolometric luminosity of ∼ 6 × 10 39 erg s −1 out to distances of 33 -43 Mpc, depending on their assumed spectral energy distribution.

Post-explosion positive jet-feedback activity in inner ejecta of core collapse supernovae

“…In the jittering jets explosion mechanism there are no failed CCSNe (e.g., Gilkis et al 2016;Soker 2017;Antoni & Quataert 2022), a claim that received a strong support with the new observational finding by Byrne & Fraser (2022). Even if a black hole forms at the center it launches very energetic jets.…”

Postexplosion Positive Jet-feedback Activity in Inner Ejecta of Core Collapse Supernovae

“…In the jittering jets explosion mechanism there are no failed CCSNe (e.g., Gilkis et al 2016;Soker 2017;Antoni & Quataert 2022), a claim that received strong support with the new observational finding by Byrne & Fraser (2022) that failed CCSNe are very rare, or even do not exist. Even if a BH forms at the center it launches very energetic jets.…”

Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory

“…Nevertheless, differences in the type of data used to estimate the frequency of flares -time-resolved photometric (Kowalski et al 2009) or spectroscopic (Hilton et al 2010) (Klagyivik & Szabados 2009). Other potential types of variable objects can be found in Byrne & Fraser (2022). Moreover, extragalactic transients that can be associated to rare blazars or accretion outbursts in active galactic nuclei (Lawrence et al 2016) or highly variable quasars or microlensing events (Nagoshi et al 2021) can also contribute.…”

“…In this scenario, the stellar cores will collapse directly to form a black hole without producing the 16 https://www.wis-tns.org/ 17 https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/Gator/nph-scan? mission=irsa&submit=Select&projshort=PTF explosion of the star (Byrne & Fraser 2022). As for supernovae and hypernovae, failed supernovae occurring at POSS-I epoch will not be visible in modern archives.…”