Ragnhild Lunnan (SU): Transients Illuminating the Fates of the Most Massive Stars

Thursday 21 May 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Stockholm

Å2004

Title: Transients Illuminating the Fates of the Most Massive Stars
Speaker: Ragnhild Lunnan
Affiliation: Stockholm University
Room: Å2004 
Time: 14:00-15:00

Abstract:
Two recent revolutions in time-domain astronomy are transforming our understanding of stellar evolution in the most massive regime: the detections of gravitational waves (GW) from binary black holes, and the discovery of new and rare classes of supernovae from wide-field transient surveys. With this, a long-standing prediction from stellar evolution theory is gaining new relevance: that stars with He cores above ~35 solar masses will encounter an instability due to pair-production, resulting in either a series of pulsations and corresponding mass ejections, or the complete disruption of the core in a pair-instability supernova. GW detectors can search for the resulting gap in the black hole mass distribution, while supernova surveys can constrain the occurrence of the pair-instability phenomenon in the low-redshift universe by searching for the associated transients. In this talk, I will discuss recent results from the Zwicky Transient Facility on extreme supernovae, and what they have taught us about the ultimate fates of the most massive stars.