2015/05/19 by Mario Spera, Spera, Mario, Michela Mapelli +3 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1505.05201
openalex publication_date 2015/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The mass spectrum of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) is highly uncertain.\nDynamical mass measurements are available only for few (\∼10) BHs in\nX-ray binaries, while theoretical models strongly depend on the hydrodynamics\nof supernova (SN) explosions and on the evolution of massive stars. In this\npaper, we present and discuss the mass spectrum of compact remnants that we\nobtained with SEVN, a new public population-synthesis code, which couples the\nPARSEC stellar evolution tracks with up-to-date recipes for SN explosion\n(depending on the Carbon-Oxygen mass of the progenitor, on the compactness of\nthe stellar core at pre-SN stage, and on a recent two-parameter criterion based\non the dimensionless entropy per nucleon at pre-SN stage). SEVN can be used\nboth as a stand-alone code and in combination with direct-summation N-body\ncodes (Starlab, HiGPUs). The PARSEC stellar evolution tracks currently\nimplemented in SEVN predict significantly larger values of the Carbon-Oxygen\ncore mass with respect to previous models. For most of the SN recipes we adopt,\nthis implies substantially larger BH masses at low metallicity\n(\≤2\×10-3), than other population-synthesis codes. The maximum\nBH mass found with SEVN is \∼25, 60 and 130 M odot at metallicity Z\n=2 \× 10-2 , 2 \×10-3 and 2\× 10-4 ,\nrespectively. Mass loss by stellar winds plays a major role in determining the\nmass of BHs for very massive stars (\≥90 M_ odot), while the remnant\nmass spectrum depends mostly on the adopted SN recipe for lower progenitor\nmasses. We discuss the implications of our results for the transition between\nNS and BH mass, and for the expected number of massive BHs (with mass >25\nM_ odot) as a function of metallicity.\n