What Happens When a Massive Star Fails (Sort of) to Explode?

There are observational and theoretical reasons to suspect that up to 10s of percent of massive stars that undergo core-collapse at the end of their lives fail to explode in a canonical energetic supernova explosion. In this talk I will describe what transpires in such nominally failed supernovae and its importance for understanding the masses and spins of black holes (e.g., detected by LIGO). I will also describe how 'failed' supernovae may manifest themselves observationally in time-domain surveys.

Speaker: Eliot Quataert, UC Berkeley