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- Lead: Scott Adams
- Others participating: Mansi Kasliwal
- Abstract: There is growing evidence that the most massive red supergiants may end their lives with a "failed" supernova, collapsing directly into a black hole without a luminous explosion. Two possible events have been found by searching for disappearing red supergiants. However, the disappearance of the progenitor is not the only possible signature of these events. Models predict that even if the energy released by the core collapse of a red supergiant fails to result in a supernova, the loss of gravitational binding energy from the neutrino emission may result in a low-velocity (~100 km/s) ejection of the weakly-bound hydrogen envelope. This ejection would result in a ~10^7 Lsun ~few days-long shock breakout thermalized to ~10^4 K followed by a fainter, but much longer-lived recombination powered transient. ZTF is uniquely capable of providing the large areal observations with nightly cadence necessary to discover these shock breakouts, which would enable, for the first time, spectroscopic follow-up and characterization of the envelope ejection and early-time fallback, and would dramatically improve the constraint on the rate failed supernovae.
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