Introduction

Exploding stars in form of Supernovae (SNe), Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs) and newly discovered mysterious transients are the most powerful explosions in the Universe and their Supernova remnants (SNR) are still seen in our Milky Way. They act as both cosmic engines and cosmic factories of elements vital for life. The most common explosion type from massive stars gives birth to fascinating objects, such as black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. Because SNe and GRBs are so luminous and are seen over cosmological distances, they have been used as powerful tools for cosmology and as probes of the early Universe. Despite their importance, however, many questions about them, including which kinds of stellar systems give rise to them, remain outstanding.

Facilities

Astrophysics is entering the Golden Age of innovative time-domain surveys that stand to revolutionize our understanding of the transient sky, and now is a great time to be involved. Members have access to the Las Cumbres Observatory through the Global SN project as well as UVa's access to large- and medium-sized- aperture telescopes: APO, LBT, Magellan and MMT. Other national, international and competitive facilities that we have used include, among others: ALMA, Chandra, GMRT, HST, JWST, Swift, TESS, UVA's Rivanna computing cluster, VLA, XMM-Newton - and of course in the near future: the Vera Rubin Observatory+LSST.

People

Here at UVa, a complimentary set of faculty and their teams are approaching these questions from many angles:

•  Poonam Chandra (NRAO and visiting faculty at UVa) works on radio and X-ray aspects

  

  • grad student Annika Deutsch works on late time rebrightening

•  Shazrene Mohamed (UVa) works on simulations of the interactions and explosions of evolved stars

  

  • grad student Hao-Sheng Wang works on theoretical modeling

    

  • Postdoc Soham Mandal works on modeling Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities in supernovae

• Roger Chevalier (Professor Emeritus, UVa) works on theoretical aspects of supernovae

  

  •  grad student Nick James works on Superluminous SNe and interacting SNe

    

•  Maryam Modjaz (UVa), via a Stellar Forensics investigation, works on optical & near-infrared aspects as well as the host galaxies of these explosions

  

  •  grad student Adrian Crawford works on large-scale photometric surveys and machine learning

    

  •  grad student Raphael Baer-Way works on interacting supernovae through multiwavelength observations using X-ray, optical, and radio data

    

  •  Postdoc Sahana Kumar is an observer specializing in optical and NIR spectroscopy of supernovae and other transients

    

  •  Postdoc Craig Pellegrino is interested in observations of rare and unusual supernovae to better understand massive star evolution

    

  • recent grad student Marc Williamson (PhD '23, NYU) works on spectral synthesis modeling, machine-learning and young spectra of SNe Ic

     

• Mojgan Aghakhanloo (VITA-Origins Fellow, UVa) works on post-main sequence evolution of massive stars

  

• Devesh Nandal (VITA-Origins Fellow, UVa) works on the most massive stars at cosmic dawn