Matt Kistler homepage. Matthew Kistler A Survey About Nothing: Monitoring a Million Supergiants for Failed Supernovae
Do stars ever disappear without a trace?
Searches for extragalactic transients have historically been limited to looking for appearances, such as supernovae. This paper determines that it is now possible to carry out a new kind of survey that will do none other than the opposite, that is, look for the disappearance of massive stars. This requires the systematic observation of ~1 million supergiants, massive stars that must end their lives with a core collapse within ~1 million years, so that something should happen to at least one of these stars yearly. Using deep imaging and image subtraction it is possible to whether these stars die with a bang (supernova) or a whimper (immediately form a black hole and fall out of sight). It will also conduct a bevy of other tests, including determining the properties of supernova progenitors, characterizing eta Carinae-like LBV mass ejections, finding large numbers of Cepheids and eclipsing binaries, and allow the discovery of any new phenomena that inhabit this relatively unexplored parameter space.
