Recent Progress on Simulating the Explosive Death of Massive Stars

by Evan O'Connor

Thursday 26 Feb 2026, 15:15 → 16:15 Europe/Stockholm

Most massive stars end their lives in spectacular explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. These events shape the cosmos: they forge and disperse the elements essential for stars, planets, and life; they regulate galaxy evolution; and they give birth to neutron stars and black holes, linking stellar death to the gravitational-wave universe. Despite their importance, the physical mechanism that powers these explosions has long been one of the central unsolved problems in theoretical astrophysics. The first seconds after core collapse involve an intricate interplay of gravity, neutrino radiation, turbulence, and magnetic fields across a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. Capturing this multi-physics environment in a self-consistent framework has posed a long-standing computational challenge, but there are hints of light at the end of the tunnel. In this talk, I will present recent progress enabled by detailed 1D, 2D, and 3D neutrino-radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of core-collapse supernovae. These simulations follow the last stages of evolution of massive stars, the collapse of the core, the emergence of hydrodynamic instabilities including neutrino-driven convection and turbulence, the onset of the explosion, and the post explosion evolution. In particular, I will highlight the progress we have made over the recent years in studying some of the most extreme core-collapse events including black hole and magnetar forming cases. Finally, I will outline implications for multimessenger astronomy, including predictions for neutrino and gravitational-wave signals, and highlight open challenges for the next generation of supernova simulations. 

About the Speaker:

Evan O’Connor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University. He specializes in computational modeling of the death of massive stars, core-collapse supernovae.  He has a particular interest in connecting the physics at small scales, the neutrino and nuclear physics, to the observables of supernovae, the multimessenger signals, nucleosynthesis, and the final compact object properties. O’Connor earned his B.Sc. from the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2012. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and a Hubble Fellowship at North Carolina State University before joining Stockholm University in 2017.