General Physics Colloquium, Professor Anna Ho, Cornell University

Title:  The Landscape of Stellar Death

Abstract:  Cosmic explosions (“transients”) have wide-ranging impact in astrophysics: on the lives and deaths of stars, the formation of compact objects (neutron stars and black holes), and heavy-element nucleosynthesis. The rapid growth of the field has been fueled in large part by telescopes opening new parameter space in timescale and wavelength. In this talk I will describe the emerging landscape of optical transients that last only a few minutes to a few days, and the implications of such fleeting phenomena for our understanding of stellar evolution, black-hole formation, and relativistic particle acceleration.