  Massive stars are of interest as progenitors of super novae, 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 super nova 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 super giants 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.
Having estimated the luminosities of all our stars within 3kpc, in particular
for all O- and early B-type stars, we have determined the median and mean
luminosities for all spectral types for luminosity classes I, III, and V. Our
luminosity values for super giants deviate from earlier results: Previous work
generally overestimates distances and luminosities compared to our data, this
is likely due to Hipparcos parallaxes (generally more accurate and larger than
previous ground-based data) and the fact that many massive stars have recently
been resolved into multiples of lower masses and luminosities. From
luminosities and effective temperatures we derived masses and ages using mass
tracks and isochrones from different authors. From masses and ages we estimated
lifetimes and derived a lower limit for the supernova rate of ~20 events/Myr
averaged over the next 10 Myrs within 600 pc from the sun. These data are then
used to search for areas in the sky with higher likelihood for a supernova or
gravitational wave event (like OB associations).
