The Landscape of the Neutrino Mechanism of Core-Collapse Supernovae: Neutron Star and Black Hole Mass Functions, Explosion Energies and Nickel Yields

Abstract

If the neutrino luminosity from the proto-neutron star formed during a massive star core collapse exceeds a critical threshold, a supernova (SN) results. Using spherical quasi-static evolutionary sequences for hundreds of progenitors over a range of metallicities, we study how the explosion threshold maps onto observables, including the fraction of successful explosions, the neutron star (NS) and black hole (BH) mass functions, the explosion energies (E_SN) and nickel yields (M_Ni), and their mutual correlations. Successful explosions are intertwined with failures in a complex pattern that is not simply related to initial progenitor mass or compactness. We predict that progenitors with initial masses of 15 +/- 1, 19 +/- 1, and 21-26 M_Sun are most likely to form BHs, that the BH formation probability is non-zero at solar-metallicity and increases significantly at low metallicity, and that low luminosity, low Ni-yield SNe come from progenitors close to success/failure interfaces. We qualitatively reproduce the observed E_SN-M_Ni correlation, we predict a correlation between the mean and width of the NS mass and E_SN distributions, and that the means of the NS and BH mass distributions are correlated. We show that the observed mean NS mass of ~1.33 M_Sun implies that the successful explosion fraction is higher than 0.35. Overall, we show that the neutrino mechanism can in principle explain the observed properties of SNe and their compact objects. We argue that the rugged landscape of progenitors and outcomes mandates that SN theory should focus on reproducing the wide ranging distributions of observed SN properties.