Confronting Models of Massive Star Evolution and Explosions with Remnant Mass Measurements

Understand

The mass distribution of compact objects provides a fossil record that can be studied to uncover information on the late stages of massive star evolution, the supernova explosion mechanism, and the dense matter equation of state.

• Observations of neutron star masses indicate a bimodal Gaussian distribution, while the observed black hole mass distribution decays exponentially for stellar-mass black holes.
• We use these observed distributions to directly confront the predictions of stellar evolution models and the neutrino-driven supernova simulations of Sukhbold et al.
• (2016).