Title：From Mass Loss to Explosion: Tracing the Diversity and Commonality in Core-Collapse Supernovae

Speaker：Qiliang Fang（方其亮） (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

Time: 3:00 pm July 10th (Thursday)

Location: Middle conference room，3rd floor

Abstract：Massive stars are expected to end their lives as core-collapse supernova (SN) explosions. Systematic investigation of these catastrophic events offers a valuable window into both stellar evolution and the physics of core collapse. In this talk, I will introduce our recent research on Type II (hydrogen-rich) SNe. In particular, we combine late-phase (nebular) spectroscopy, which probes the innermost ejecta, with early-phase light curve modeling, which constrains the structure of the progenitor’s outer envelope. By bridging the surface and core properties of the progenitors in a large sample of well-observed SNe II, we uncover a wide range of mass-loss histories and evolutionary pathways that go beyond the standard stellar evolution models. Despite this diversity, we find a similarity in their explosion mechanisms, which closely match the expectations of modern neutrino-driven core-collapse simulations. This apparent diversity in progenitor evolution but unity in explosion mechanism offers new insights into the roles of mass loss, binary interaction, and envelope stripping in shaping the observed variety of SNe II. I will discuss how our results relate to the broader family of stripped-envelope supernovae and how phenomena such as stellar pulsations and binary mass transfer may contribute to the continuum between classical SNe II and more exotic transients. This unified framework provides a physically grounded way to interpret the growing diversity in massive star explosions across observational classes.

Bio: Dr. Qiliang Fang is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. He received his B.Sc. from Peking University in 2017 and his Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 2023. Qiliang's research primarily focuses on exploring the mass-loss history and explosion mechanisms of core-collapse supernovae. He is also interested in hydrodynamic and radiative transfer modeling of transients, aiming to reveal the origin of their observational diversity.