Description:

Title: "Exploring the unknown: Massive Stars at the very end of their lives"

Speaker: Raffaella Margutti, Harvard University

Abstract: Observations are drawing a complex picture of the latest stages of massive stars evolution and their explosions. In this seminar I concentrate on one among the least understood aspects of stellar evolution, adopting an observational perspective: How do massive stars loose a significant fraction of their mass in the years preceding the explosion? I address this question by taking advantage from panchromatic observations of two remarkable explosions: (i) the puzzling, double explosion of SN2009ip in 2012; (ii) and the normal envelope-stripped SN2014C, which experienced a dramatic metamorphosis and evolved from Type I into Type II supernova over a timescale of a few months, thus violating the supernova classification scheme that hat has existed for decades.

Speaker Schedule

Hosted by Vicky Kalogera