New insights into the death throes of massive stars from the Zwicky Transient Facility

by Dr Steve Schulze (OKC)

Tuesday 15 Mar 2022, 13:15 → 14:15 Europe/Stockholm

Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/62320153507

The past decade in time-domain astronomy was characterised by the unparalleled efforts of optical synoptic surveys to explore the entire transient phase-space systematically. In 2018, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) started its science observations and joined these efforts, pushing data volume and alert rate to a new order of magnitude. It monitors the entire northern hemisphere every two nights. In addition, one of the ZTF partnership surveys scans a smaller area of the sky six times every night, and other complementary transient surveys are designed to target niches of the Zwicky Transient Facility northern sky survey. This opens the opportunity to i) map out existing gaps in the transient phase-space, ii) search for theoretically predicted but not yet detected phenomena, and iii) study one of the final frontiers in supernova science: the first hours after a massive-star system explodes. A growing number of supernovae also show outbursts prior to their final explosion. These precursors offer a unique view of the poorly charted phenomena in the final stages of stellar evolution. The depth and cadence of the Zwicky Transient Facility and other surveys are well suited to search for those precursors. In this talk, I will present the latest findings from the Zwicky Transient Facility on the death throes of massive stars, the discovery of a new supernova class and the implications it has on our understanding of the fates of massive stars. I will conclude by giving an outlook on new technical developments that allow catching supernovae by their first photons.