The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce that our free Public Talks for the 2024-2025 season will take place at Burlington House at 1pm and 6pm. Please check the schedule as some talks may be online-only due to speaker availability.
Each session consists of a 45 minute talk & a 15 minute Q&A session
Session at 1-2pm: To register for the 1pm hybrid talk - links TBA
Session at 6-7pm: To register for the 6pm hybrid talk - links TBA
How Do Massive Stars Live and Die?
Massive stars - those more than 10 times the mass of our Sun and up to a million times brighter - play a fundamental role in the evolution of the Universe. These stellar giants live fast and ferocious lives, burning through their fuel at an astonishing rate before ending their lives in the dramatic explosions known as supernovae. It is through these supernovae that many heavy elements essential to life are formed and scattered throughout the cosmos. But do all massive stars end their lives this way? In this talk, we'll explore the life cycle of some of the most extreme stars in the Universe and the revolutionary insights the Hubble Space Telescope has provided to the field of stellar physics over the past 35 years.
About our speaker:
Dr. Emma Beasor is currently a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow and academic staff member at the Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University. She obtained her PhD from LJMU in 2019, after which she was awarded a prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship to continue her research at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Arizona. An expert on the lives and deaths of massive stars, her research focuses particularly on the behaviour of stars leading up to supernovae including how their stellar winds or nearby companions may alter their final fate.
Image Credits: Dr Emma Beasor
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