# Do all massive stars explode?

I've read a few articles written in $2008$ that some stars which have enough mass just collapse into black holes without a supernova, is this proven?

• Failed supernovae are certainly possible, but the jury is still out on black holes emerging anyway: arxiv.org/abs/1609.01283 – called2voyage Apr 19 '17 at 20:41
• There are hypothesis about supernovas that were in such massive stars that the outer layers contained the blast, yet a black hole still formed in the middle. They might have been stable for a few million years even. I just saw this video yesterday talking about it. They don't have a definitive answer either, but it is a little more information about the topic. – Cody Apr 19 '17 at 23:58

The minimum mass for the progenitor of a failed supernova is unknown (and as Rob Jeffries pointed out, this is metallicity-dependent). Some early models (e.g. Fryer (1999)) found that stars above $40M_{\odot}$ could produced failed supernovae, while newer ones suggest that this could be as low as $25M_{\odot}$. This lower limit would include a sizable portion of red supergiants - which could be a possible solution to the red supergiant problem.