Red and Dead: The Progenitor of SN 2012aw in M95

Core-collapse supernovae (SNe) are the spectacular finale to massive stellar evolution. In this Letter, we identify a progenitor for the nearby core-collapse SN 2012aw in both ground-based near-infrared and space-based optical pre-explosion imaging. The SN itself appears to be a normal Type II Plateau event, reaching a bolometric luminosity of 1042 erg s-1 and photospheric velocities of ~11,000 km s-1 from the position of the Hβ P-Cygni minimum in the early SN spectra. We use an adaptive optics image to show that the SN is coincident to within 27 mas with a faint, red source in pre-explosion HST+WFPC2, VLT+ISAAC, and NTT+SOFI images. The source has magnitudes F555W = 26.70 ± 0.06, F814W = 23.39 ± 0.02, J = 21.1 ± 0.2, K = 19.1 ± 0.4, which, when compared to a grid of stellar models, best matches a red supergiant. Interestingly, the spectral energy distribution of the progenitor also implies an extinction of AV > 1.2 mag, whereas the SN itself does not appear to be significantly extinguished. We interpret this as evidence for the destruction of dust in the SN explosion. The progenitor candidate has a luminosity between 5.0 and 5.6 log L/L sun, corresponding to a zero-age main-sequence mass between 14 and 26 M sun (depending on AV ), which would make this one of the most massive progenitors found for a core-collapse SN to date.