Observational Constraints for the Progenitors of Core-Collapse Supernovae

Observations indicate that massive stars ends their lives violently, but exactly how massive they need to be remains an astrophysical challenge. Stellar evolution predicts make two fundamental predictions about the fate of massive stars. One is that (single) stars with masses above 8 solar masses are likely explode as core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), and the second is that some of these stars fails to explode and form black-holes. Even though these fundamental predictions are important in stellar evolution, constraining them with observations has remained elusive. There are only a handful of progenitors with archival image before explosion. In an effort to increase the number of progenitors, an alternate technique has been used during the last decade (or so). This technique consist of characterizing the stellar populations in the vicinity of SNe and supernova remnants (SNRs). Age-dating the stellar populations around SNe has the potential to find the progenitor masses for thousands of SNe. In this dissertation, we develop a statistical framework to infer the progenitor mass distribution for CCSNe given these observations. Assuming single-stellar evolution, we find a minimum mass of 7.33^{+0.02}_{-0.16} solar masses, maximum mass > 59 solar masses, and a slope of alpha=-2.96^{+0.45}_{-0.25} for ~100 SNRs with a 68% confidence interval. While these results are consistent with previous estimates, they also provide tighter constrains. For the SNR progenitor mass distribution, the slope is steeper than the standard Salpeter initial mass function (alpha=-2.35). This suggests that the SNR catalogs are biased towards the youngest SF regions or that the most massive stars are not exploding frequently. More recently, using 22 historic SNe, we found a minimum mass of 8.60^{+0.37}_{-0.41} solar masses and slope of alpha=-2.61^{+1.05}_{-1.18} while fixing the maximum mass to 34.6 solar masses. These results are closer to the canonical values and both inferred parameters are consistent within uncertainties with previous progenitor estimates using direct detections and the age-dating technique. These results further confirm that using stellar populations around SN and SNRs is a reliable way to infer progenitor masses.