A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Gone without a bang: an archival HST survey for disappearing massive stars




AuthorsThomas M. Reynolds, Morgan Fraser,Gerard Gilmore

PublisherOxford University Press

Publishing placeOxford

Publication year2015

JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Journal acronymMNRAS

Volume453

Issue3

First page 2885

Last page2900

Number of pages16

ISSN0035-8711

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv1809

Web address http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/453/3/2885


Abstract

It has been argued that a substantial fraction of massive stars may end their lives without an optically bright supernova (SN), but rather collapse to form a black hole. Such an event would not be detected by current SN surveys, which are focused on finding bright transients. Kochanek et al. proposed a novel survey for such events, using repeated observations of nearby galaxies to search for the disappearance of a massive star. We present such a survey, using the first systematic analysis of archival Hubble Space Telescope images of nearby galaxies with the aim of identifying evolved massive stars which have disappeared, without an accompanying optically bright SN. We consider a sample of 15 galaxies, with at least three epochs of Hubble Space Telescope imaging taken between 1994 and 2013. Within this data, we find one candidate which is consistent with a 25–30 M yellow supergiant which has undergone an optically dark core-collapse.



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