The progenitors of core-collapse supernovae

Abstract

We present maps of the nature of single star progenitors of supernovae and their remnants in mass and metallicity space. We find our results are similar to others but we have gone further in varying the amount of mixing and using various mass-loss schemes to see how the maps change. We find that extra mixing, in the form of convective overshooting, moves boundaries such as the minimum mass for a supernova or Wolf-Rayet (WR) star to lower masses. We also find that the pre-WR mass loss determines the shape of our maps. We find that different mass-loss rates lead to quite different results. We find that the rise in luminosity at second dredge-up places quite tight constraints on the masses of some progenitors and in particular the progenitor of supernova 2003gd.