Exploding Stars and Time Domain Astronomy

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:

Image	Poonam Chandra (NRAO and visiting faculty at UVA) works on radio and X-ray aspects
Image	Grad student Raphael Baer-Way works on interacting supernovae through multiwavelength observations using X-ray, optical, and radio data (co-advised with Maryam Modjaz) (Advisor, Poonam Chandra)
Image	Grad student Annika Deutsch works on late time rebrightening (Advisor, Poonam Chandra)
Image	Grad student Sajana Gupta will be joining us Fall 2025 (Advisor, Poonam Chandra)
Image	Recent post-bacc student Eliza Hillenkamp works on X-ray emission from dusty supernovae (Advisor, Poonam Chandra)
Image	Shazrene Mohamed (UVA) works on simulations of the interactions and explosions of evolved stars
Image	Grad student Hao-Sheng Wang works on theoretical modeling (Advisor, Shazrene Mohamed)
Image	Postdoc Soham Mandal works on modeling Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities in supernovae (Advisor, Shazrene Mohamed)
Image	Roger Chevalier (Professor Emeritus, UVA) works on theoretical aspects of supernovae
Image	Grad student Nick James works on Superluminous SNe and interacting SNe (Advisor, Roger Chevalier)
Image	Maryam Modjaz (UVA), via a Stellar Forensics investigation, works on optical & near-infrared aspects as well as the host galaxies of these explosions
Image	Grad student Adrian Crawford works on large-scale photometric surveys and machine learning (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Grad student Raphael Baer-Way works on interacting supernovae through multiwavelength observations using X-ray, optical, and radio data (co-advised with Poonam Chandra) (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Grad student Michaela Schwab is joining us Fall 2025 (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Postdoc Sahana Kumar is an observer specializing in optical and NIR spectroscopy of supernovae and other transients (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Undergraduate student Altony Foote works on stripped envelope SNe and circumstellar interaction (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Recent undergraduate student Muhammed Mousa (UVA '25) works on Ic-Broad Line and their connections to long-duration gamma ray bursts (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Recent postdoc Craig Pellegrino is interested in observations of rare and unusual supernovae to better understand massive star evolution (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Recent grad student Marc Williamson (PhD '23, NYU) works on spectral synthesis modeling, machine-learning and young spectra of SNe Ic (Advisor, Maryam Modjaz)
Image	Mojgan Aghakhanloo (VITA-Origins Fellow, UVA) works on post-main sequence evolution of massive stars
Image	Devesh Nandal (VITA-Origins Fellow, UVA) works on the most massive stars at cosmic dawn