Seán Brennan

Massive stars live for millions of years and end their lives in seconds when they undergo core collapse.

Understanding which massive stars will undergo core collapse is an almost impossible task. However, in the past 20 years, a growing sample of massive stars has shown some energetic activity in the years before a core-collapse supernova is observed, typically found by looking at historical observations.

My current work is centered on identifying these outbursts from massive stars in real-time, in the weeks to months before they end their lives as core-collapse supernovae, with the ultimate goal of obtaining spectral observations. Although this attempts to predict the future, recent results show that massive star progenitors can be highly unstable in their final moments, providing strong evidence of shells of dense material colliding with previously ejected material, which is likely the main powering mechanism for these events.

Understanding the reason for this instability shortly before core collapse is unclear; however, this work highlights an exciting new area of transient astronomy