Stars end their lives in a variety of ways. Low mass stars puff off their outer layers and settle down to become white dwarfs while massive stars end their lives in spectacular supernova explosions. A long hypothesized way for stars to end their lives by collisions of stars or stellar remnants in the densely packed area near a galaxy’s massive black hole. Andrew Levan recently found evidence of this new phenomena while following up a long gamma ray burst. In this podcast, Andrew Levan describes how a variety of telescopes provided the first evidence for this new way for a star to end its life.

 

Bios: Rob Sparks is in the Communications, Education and Engagement group at NSF’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona.

Andrew Levan is a professor at Radbound University in the Netherlands where he  studies astrophysical transients such as Gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, tidal disruption events and most recently the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources.

 

Links: 

NOIRLab Press Release: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2319/

NOIRLab social media channels can be found at

https://www.facebook.com/NOIRLabAstro

https://twitter.com/NOIRLabAstro

https://www.instagram.com/noirlabastro/

https://www.youtube.com/noirlabastro

 

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