Description:

Title: Using How Stars Die to Learn About How They Lived

Speaker: Tony Piro, Carnegie Observatories

Host: Vicky Kalogera

Abstract: Supernovae are amazing cosmic explosions where for a few weeks to months a single star can become as bright as a billion stars combined. Even though supernovae are crucial in a wide range of areas in astrophysics, from producing the elements to galactic evolution to measuring the accelerating expansion of our Universe, the actual progenitors are frustratingly elusive. This is now changing with surveys that are discovering supernovae earlier than ever and efforts to consolidate and follow-up these events. I will discuss theoretical work that utilizes these obsevations to measure fundamental quantities of the stars in their moments before death, such as their mass, radius, and properties of their circumstellar material. I will also present novel efforts to track down which stars end their lives as black holes through potential transient events and nucleosynthetic signatures.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics