by
Hans-Thomas Janka(Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany)
→
Europe/Stockholm
FA 31
FA 31
Description
The talk will review the current status of understanding
the evolution of massive stars and their final collapse
and explosion, with particular focus on the physics of
core-collapse supernovae. While stars near the low-mass end
of supernova progenitors (around roughly nine solar masses)
are found to explode robustly by the neutrino-heating
mechanism, the current models still yield controversial
results of how stars more massive than 10 solar masses
ultimately die. New results from multi-dimensional
hydrodynamic simulations by the Garching group suggest that
neutrino energy deposition may also be responsible for the
powerful disruption of such stars, but the onset of
the explosion happens much later than thought so far and is
crucially supported by the presence of the so-called
non-radial "standing accretion shock instability" in the
supernova core. As a consequence, the gas ejection can be
initiated with a large global asymmetry, which has important
observable implications for pulsar kicks and element
mixing in the supernova matter.