Host: Xianzhong Zheng

Join Tencent Meeting：https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/oykf8Nr1ihUW

Meeting ID: 758986032 (no password）

Abstract:

Most massive stars are believed to end their lives in spectacular supernova explosions through collapse of inner iron cores. However, the exact explosion physics and the link of core-collapse supernovae of various types to the corresponding massive stars are far from being understood. Mulitband observations, especially at very early phase after supernova explosions, provide crucial clues to the explosion mechanism, the properties of surrounding environments and progenitor stars as well. In this talk, I will report our progress in the above aspects,  including the successful  detections of aspherical shock breakout for two nearby type II supernovae, connecting a superluminous supernova with pulsational pair-instability mechanism, and discovery ofjet-driven supernova explosion without an accompanied gamma-ray burst. These results demonstrate that massive stars like red supergiants and wolf-rayet stars would undergo intense, eruptive mass loss immediately before exploding, perhaps due to binary interaction and/or pulsational mass ejection etc. 

Biography:

Dr. Xiaofeng Wang is a professor of physics department at Tsinghua University. He got his bachelor's degree in astrophysics in 1997 and PhD in 2002 from Beijing Normal University. He ever worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NAOC (2002-2004), UC Berkeley (2006-2009) and Texas A&M University (2009-2010), focusing on  studies of supernovae and time-domain astronomy. Since 2010 prof.  Wang joined Tsinghua University, where he has led several transient  survey  projects, including Tsinghua-NAOC Transient Survey (TNTS) and Tsinghua-Ma huateng Telescope for Survey (TMTS). In 2013 he was selected to "The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars"; in 2015, he was awarded  the "Shoushu Huang" prize by the Chinese Astronomical Society; in 2021 he won the Tencent Xplorer Prize. Prof. Xiaofeng Wang  has published over 200 papers with his collaborators (including 10 in Science, Nature and Nature Astronomy).