On the Road to the Supernova: LBVs, Hypergiants, and SN Impostors

这一奖项将资助对发光蓝色变星的观测和理论研究，发光蓝色变星是指经历强烈质量损失并演化为红超巨星的大质量恒星。它们被广泛认为是核心崩塌超新星的祖先，但如果它们一生中损失的质量足够高，其中许多可能不会爆炸。这个团队将在附近的几个星系中对这些变数进行长期观测，以便更好地统计这些天体，阐明可能导致巨大喷发的机制，并更好地了解质量损失的机制，以及恒星在经历周期性(而不是稳定的)质量损失时如何演变。现代超新星调查发现，附近星系中有一些不是真正的超新星的天体，即“超新星冒名星”，这些天体可能是像船底座这样的天体，在几年内质量下降了10-20倍太阳。这些最大质量恒星的最后阶段对于有效的恒星天体物理学图像是重要的，它们在宇宙学中越来越重要。它们可能是被用作宇宙学探测器的伽马射线暴的祖先，宇宙中的许多第一批恒星被认为是非常大的质量。

This award will fund a combined observational and theoretical study of luminous blue variables, which are massive stars experiencing strong mass loss and evolving to be red supergiants. They are widely believed to the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae, but many of these may not explode if the mass lost during their lifetimes is high enough. This team will conduct long-term observations of these variables in several nearby galaxies, in order to get an improved census of these objects, elucidate the mechanisms that may be responsible for giant eruptions, and to better understand the mechanism of mass loss and how stars evolve as they experience episodic (rather than steady) mass loss.Modern supernova surveys are finding a number objects in nearby galaxies which are not true supernovae, the "supernova impostors," which may be objects like eta Carinae that shed 10-20 times the mass of our Sun in a few years. The final stages of these most massive stars are important for a valid picture of stellar astrophysics and they are increasingly significant in cosmology. They are the likely progenitors of Gamma Ray Bursters used as cosmological probes, and many of the first stars in the universe are thought to have been very massive.