Related papers: Around the Pair Instability Valley - Massive SN Pr…
SN 2006gy was the most luminous SN ever observed at the time of its discovery and the first of the newly defined class of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe). The extraordinary energetics of SN 2006gy and all SLSNe (>10^51 erg) require either…
The theory underlying the evolution and death of stars heavier than 10 Msun on the main sequence is reviewed with an emphasis upon stars much heavier than 30 Msun. These are stars that, in the absence of substantial mass loss, are expected…
We present preliminary results from two dimensional numerical studies of pair instability supernova (PSN). We study nuclear burning, hydrodynamic instabilities and explosion of very massive stars. Use a new radiation-hydrodynamics code,…
Interactions between massive stars in binaries are thought to be responsible for much of the observed diversity of supernovae. As surveys probe rarer populations of events, we should expect to see supernovae arising from increasingly…
Core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) are catastrophic astrophysical phenomena that occur during the last evolutionary stages of massive stars having initial masses of around 8 M$_{\odot}$ or more. These calamitous events play a pivotal role in…
It has been recently proposed that very massive white dwarfs endowed with strongly quantizing magnetic fields might be the progenitors of overluminous type Ia supernovae like SN 2006gz and SN 2009dc. In this work, we show that the onset of…
Massive stars, by which we mean those stars exploding as core collapse supernovae, play a pivotal role in the evolution of the Universe. Therefore, the understanding of their evolution and explosion is fundamental in many branches of…
The discovery of a population of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), with peak luminosities a factor of ~100 brighter than normal SNe (typically SLSNe have M_V <-21), has shown an unexpected diversity in core-collapse supernova properties.…
Massive stars end their short lives in spectacular explosions, supernovae, that synthesize new elements and drive galaxy evolution. Throughout history supernovae were discovered chiefly through their delayed optical light, preventing…
It is suggested that magnetars eventually become unstable to a dynamic overturning instability that destroys most of their dipole moment in a single event. It is further suggested that such an instability would produce a supergiant version…
Some reports of supernova (SN) discoveries turn out not to be true core-collapse explosions. One such case was SN 2009ip, which was recognized to be a luminous blue variable (LBV) eruption. This source had a massive hot progenitor star…
Recent stellar evolution models show consistently that very massive metal-free stars evolve into red supergiants shortly before they explode. We argue that the envelopes of these stars, which will form pair-instability supernovae, become…
The death of massive stars is shrouded in many mysteries. One of them is the mechanism that overturns the collapse of the degenerate iron core into an explosion, a process that determines the supernova explosion energy, properties of the…
SN2006tf is the third most luminous SN discovered so far, after SN2005ap and SN2006gy. SN2006tf is valuable because it provides a link between two regimes: (1) luminous type IIn supernovae powered by emission directly from interaction with…
A Pulsational Pair-instability supernova (PPISN) evolves from a massive star with a mass $\sim 80$ -- 140 $M_{\odot}$ which develops the electron-positron pair-instability after the hydrostatic He-burning in the core has finished. In [Leung…
Type II-plateau supernovae (SNe IIP) are the results of the explosions of red supergiants and are the most common subclass of core-collapse supernovae. Past observations have shown that the outer layers of the ejecta of SNe IIP are largely…
The explosion of ultra-stripped stars in close binaries may explain new discoveries of weak and fast optical transients. We have demonstrated that helium star companions to neutron stars (NSs) may evolve into naked metal cores as low as…
I summarize what we have learned about the nature of stars that ultimately explode as core-collapse supernovae from the examination of images taken prior to the explosion. By registering pre-supernova and post-supernova images, usually…
The process of uniform supernovae explosions (SNe) is well investigated for all their types. However, observational data suggests that the SNe could be not spherically-symmetric. Modern multi-dimensional simulations of SNe demonstrate…
A group of super-luminous supernovae (SL-SNe) characterised by broad light curves have been suggested to be Pair Instability SNe (PISNe). Nebular spectra computed using PISN models have failed to reproduce the broad emission lines observed…