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Description
Massive stars are of interest as progenitors of supernovae, i.e. neutron stars and black holes, which can be sources of gravitational waves. Recent population synthesis models can predict neutron star and gravitational wave observations but deal with a fixed supernova rate or an assumed initial mass function for the population of massive stars. Here we investigate those massive stars, which are supernova progenitors, i.e. with O- and early B-type stars, and also all supergiants within 3kpc. We restrict our sample to those massive stars detected both in 2MASS and observed by Hipparcos, i.e. only those stars with parallax and precise photometry. To determine the luminosities we calculated the extinctions from published multi-colour photometry, spectral types, luminosity class, all corrected for multiplicity and recently revised Hipparcos distances. We use luminosities and temperatures to estimate the masses and ages of these stars using different models from different authors.
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