Speaker
Stephen Smartt
(Queen's University Belfast)
Description
Wide-field optical sky surveys are discovering a remarkable diversity
in how stars merge, collapse and explode. The powering mechanism for
many of these requires a source beyond radioactivity, plausibly a
magnetic, rapidly spinning neutron star. The discovery of
the electromagnetic counterpart to a pair of merging neutron stars
and other rapid transients from merging binary systems illustrate
the new types of explosion mechanisms in the transient sky.
I will review some recent discoveries from explosive stellar
mergers and discuss the future potential in the era of
the Rubin Observatory.
Primary author
Stephen Smartt
(Queen's University Belfast)
