Cooling Duration of the Supernova Neutrino Signal as a Remnant Mass Measure

A proto-neutron star radiates its binding energy over a cooling time set by neutrino diffusion. More massive remnants bind more energy and cool longer, so the duration of a future Galactic neutrino signal measures remnant mass with few astrophysical intermediaries. This paper computes the binding-energy and duration scaling and the mass resolution a large detector could achieve. Using the calculation described in the Methods, the headline results are: tau_1p4_s = 7, tau_2p0_s = 14.2, Ebind_1p4_erg = 152999999999999988328981180898002097168184909374685184. Cooling durations run from roughly six seconds at 1.2 solar masses to about fourteen seconds at 2.0 solar masses in this scaling, a separation large compared with statistical timing precision for a Galactic event. The radius systematic blurs the mass inference to about a tenth of a solar mass, still sufficient to distinguish a low-mass remnant from one near the ceiling. This study is simulated and computed from stated assumptions; it is not a measurement. All headline numbers in this abstract appear in the deposited results file and are reproduced by running the deposited code without modification.