Скачать или смотреть Mojgan Aghakhanloo: Massive Star Eruptions Across Galaxies: A Multiwavelength View in the LSST Era

WSU Physics Colloquium: 5 February 2026

Mojgan Aghakhanloo: Massive Star Eruptions Across Galaxies: A Multiwavelength View in the LSST Era

Massive stars end their lives in some of the most dramatic events in the universe, but before they explode, some undergo violent eruptions that resemble supernovae but are less energetic, raising fundamental questions about how massive stars lose mass before explosion. In this talk, I will take you on a journey from parsec to gigaparsec scales, tracing these eruptions from our own Galaxy to the distant universe. We will begin with the most famous Galactic example, Eta Carinae, whose nineteenth-century eruption expelled more than a solar mass per year. We then move to eruptive massive stars in the Magellanic Clouds that are isolated from other massive stars pointing to an origin in binary evolution, with some being runaway stars and others the result of mergers or mass gainers. We will then explore recently discovered extragalactic analogs that show quasi-periodic eruptions, where the eruptions are likely triggered by periastron encounters in eccentric binary systems, and finally discuss the most recent JWST discovery of an Eta Carinae–like object at high redshift. These events are linked to Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs), a short-lived and unstable observational phase of massive stars during which they shed large amounts of mass and may transition into Wolf–Rayet stars. In some cases, these eruptions may create the dense circumstellar material observed around interacting supernovae and may serve as their direct progenitors, challenging predictions from singlestar models. I will conclude with a detailed discussion of how the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will transform the discovery and characterization of eruptive massive stars, and how synergy with JWST, Chandra, and the Roman Space Telescope will enable a comprehensive, multiwavelength view of these transients across cosmic time.