The Rugged Landscape of the Core-Collapse Supernova Explosions

The collapse of the core and the associated supernova explosion mark the end of life of most massive stars, but the mechanism of explosion is poorly understood and perhaps even unknown. By parameterizing the systematic uncertainty in the explosion mechanism, we study how the explosion threshold maps onto observables - fraction of successful explosions, remnant neutron star and black hole mass functions, explosion energies, nickel yields - and their mutual correlations. Successful explosions are intertwined with failures in a complex but well-defined pattern that is not well described by the progenitor initial mass and is tied to the pre-collapse structure of the progenitor star. We present a new method to extract the supernova parameters from light curves and expansion velocities, and illustrate how can these observables constrain the explosion mechanism in the future.