ITC Colloquium: Daichi Tsuna - The Last Moments of Massive Stars

Portrait of Daichi Tsuna

Date and Time

February 19, 2026
11:00AM - 12:00PM EST

Location

Phillips Auditorium

In person for CfA members and streaming on YouTube.

The Last Moments of Massive Stars

The evolution and explosions of massive stars influence astrophysics across all scales throughout the history of the universe. Recent optical surveys have provided new insights into how these stars spend their last “moments" of their lives — years to decades before the final explosion. I will present an overview of the puzzles emerging from these observations, including the ubiquitous presence of dense circumstellar matter and the discovery of luminous precursor emission in stellar explosions, and discuss our current theoretical understanding of these phenomena. Finally, I will explore what we may learn from time-domain surveys in the years ahead, in the era of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.