摘要:How massive stars end their lives and produce diverse stellar explosions remains a fundamental question in astrophysics. I will highlight our group’s recent progress in connecting massive-star progenitors to their explosive outcomes. Early observations of some nearby Type II supernovae probe shock breakout from red supergiants, constraining their final mass loss, circumstellar environments, and explosion geometry. Extensive observations of the Type I superluminous supernova SN 2017egm invokes collisions with shells expelled through pulsational pair instability, suggesting a progenitor with an initial mass of roughly 100 solar masses. Einstein Probe discovery of some X-ray transients are found to be associated with broad-lined Type Ic SNe, bridging ordinary supernova explosion from stripped Wolf–Rayet stars and gamma-ray bursts with relativistic jets. Together, these studies help understand how different massive stars produce the rich diversity of stellar explosions.
简介:Xiaofeng Wang is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. He obtained his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from Beijing Normal University, and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the NAOC, University of California at Berkeley, and Texas A&M University. His research focuses on supernovae and time-domain astronomy. He has led Tsinghua-NAOC Transient Survey (TNTS) and Tsinghua Ma Huateng Telescopes for Survey (TMTS), which lead to discovery of hundreds of nearby supernovae and thousands of short-period eclipsing binaries and peculiar pulsators. He has co-authored over 250 refereed publications (including over 10 in Nature, Science and their sister journals) with over 17,000 citations, and was ever awarded the Huang Shou-Shu Award of the Chinese Astronomical Society and the Tencent Xplorer Prize.


