ERC Starting Grant · 2021
Transients Illuminating the Fates of the Most Massive Stars
Two recent revolutions in time-domain astronomy are transforming our understanding of stellar evolution in the most massive regime: the detections of gravitational waves (GW) from binary black holes, and the discovery of new and rare classes of supernovae from wide-field transient surveys. With this, a long-standing prediction from stellar evolution theory is gaining new relevance: that stars with He cores above ~35 solar masses will encounter an instability due to pair-production, resulting in either a series of pulsations and corresponding mass ejections, or the complete disruption of the core in a pair-instability supernova. GW detectors can search for the resulting gap in the black hole…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.