[Astro] Lunch Talk & Visitor - 13/11/25

[Joseph Butler]

Hi all,

This Thursday (13/11/25), we will be visited by Andrés Ponte Perez, a third year PhD student from the University of Birmingham, whose research concentrates on gravitationally lensed explosive transients, including core collapse supernovae. He will be giving the lunch talk at 1pm (title and abstract below). We might go for lunch in Portland either before or just after the talk, so if you’re interested in joining let me know.

Title: Gravitationally Lensed Type IIn Supernovae in the LSST era

Abstract: Over the next decade, large surveys, such as Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), are expected to yield hundreds to thousands of detections of gravitationally lensed supernovae, offering unprecedented advances in the study of these phenomena. Of particular note is the expected prevalence of Type IIn supernovae, which, with ~50 detections expected per year, dominate the predicted detection rates among lensed transients. This is despite making up only 5-10% of the local observed non-lensed core-collapse supernova population. In this talk, I will discuss why Type IIn supernovae are uniquely suited for detections when gravitationally lensed. I will explore the properties of the predicted population of detections and what we might be able to learn and infer from this population about the terminal stages of massive stars across cosmic time. I will also discuss the prospects of performing spectroscopic follow-up, how gravitational lensing might provide a novel means to improve the time precision of the spectroscopic time series of these supernovae, and the powerful implications of high-cadence spectroscopy for the study of circumstellar interaction in supernovae.

Thanks,
Joe
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