Related papers: Measuring the Upper End of the Initial Mass Functi…

Type IIP supernovae (SNe IIP) are thought to originate from the explosion of massive stars > 10 Msun. Their luminosity is primarily powered by the explosion energy and the radioactive decay energy of 56Co, with the photosphere location…

Stars are amongst the most fundamental structures of our Universe. They comprise most of the baryonic and luminous mass of galaxies, synthethise heavy elements, and injec\ t mass, momentum, and energy into the interstellar medium. They are…

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…

Over the last 15 years, the supernova community has endeavoured to identify progenitor stars of core-collapse supernovae in high resolution archival images of their galaxies.This review compiles results (from 1999 - 2013) in a distance…

JWST observations have revealed that massive galaxies formed and evolved far faster than predicted by galaxy formation models, with many having already assembled a large mass in stars $\sim12$ billion years ago [1-7]. However, masses of…

The progenitors of core-collapse supernovae are stars with an initial mass greater than about 8M(sun). Understanding the evolution of these stars is necessary to comprehend the evolution and differences between supernovae. We have…

The stellar initial mass function (IMF) integrated over an entire galaxy is an integral over all separate star-formation events. Since most stars form in star clusters with different masses the integrated IMF becomes an integral of the…

The observed masses of the most massive stars do not surpass about 150Msun. This may either be a fundamental upper mass limit which is defined by the physics of massive stars and/or their formation, or it may simply reflect the increasing…

The essential features of the stellar Initial Mass Function are, rather generally, (1) a peak at a mass of a few tenths of a solar mass, and (2) a power-law tail toward higher masses that is similar to the original Salpeter function. Recent…

Recent observations of a large fraction of Type II supernovae show traces of dense circumstellar medium (CSM) very close to the progenitor star. If this CSM is created by eruptive mass loss several months before core-collapse, the eruption…

Here we present new - and, nevertheless, last - mid-infrared (mid-IR) data for supernovae (SNe) based on measurements with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Comparing our recent 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m photometry with previously published mid-IR and…

Context: The shape of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) of a star cluster near its upper mass limit is a focal topic of investigation as it determines the high mass stellar content and hence the dynamics of the cluster at its embedded…

Superluminous supernovae are a new class of supernovae that were recognized about a decade ago. Both observational and theoretical progress has been significant in the last decade. In this review, we first briefly summarize the…

We present maps of the nature of single star progenitors of supernovae and their remnants in mass and metallicity space. We find our results are similar to others but we have gone further in varying the amount of mixing and using various…

When a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it either explodes as a supernova or more quiescently becomes a white dwarf, an object about half the mass of our Sun with a radius of about that of the Earth. About one fifth of white dwarfs exhibit…

We investigate the initial progenitor mass dependence of the early-phase neutrino signal from supernovae taking neutrino oscillations into account. The early-phase analysis has advantages in that it is not affected by the time evolution of…

The explosive death of a star as a supernova is one of the most dramatic events in the Universe. Supernovae have an outsized impact on many areas of astrophysics: they are major contributors to the chemical enrichment of the cosmos and…

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…

It has been shown before that the high mass-to-light ratios of ultra compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) can be explained if their stellar initial mass function (IMF) was top-heavy, i.e. that the IMF was skewed towards high mass stars. In this…

It is now well-established that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) can be determined from the absorption line spectra of old stellar systems, and this has been used to measure the IMF and its variation across the early-type galaxy…