Denys Wilkinson Building, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH
Dr Dan Perley
A Complete Survey of the Catastrophic Universe: Science with 10,000 Supernovae
The night sky is filled with activity: a star explodes somewhere in the observable universe once every second. The vast majority of these explosions go unheralded, but new generations of synoptic surveys are finally enabling us to systematically chart the entire parameter space of these dramatic endpoints of stellar evolution. I will describe how we are using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a wide-field high-cadence optical survey using the historic 1.4-meter telescope at the Palomar Observatory, to survey the entire "zoo" of energetic cosmic explosions. I will first present new measurements of the demographics of a variety of well-established supernova types and illustrate how these observations are providing new insights into the connection between the lives and deaths of their massive stellar progenitors. Then, moving to the extremes of stellar evolution I will summarize our discoveries of the rarest and most energetic explosions: off-axis gamma-ray bursts, mildly-relativistic fireballs, ultraluminous tidal disruption events, and a new and poorly-understood class of explosion associated with the rapid accretion of a star onto a stellar- or intermediate-mass black hole.