Speaker
Description
Shining tens to hundreds of times brighter than ordinary supernovae, superluminous supernovae provide an extreme view of power sources that may contribute to a range of cosmic explosions. Their high luminosities make them detectable throughout the high redshift universe where they may serve as tracers of their massive stellar progenitors and probes of the changes of gas in star-forming regions back to the epoch of the first stars. In this talk I will discuss the different types of superluminous supernovae, the roles that magnetars and circumstellar interactions play in shaping these rare events, and how we can use JWST to discover them at high redshifts. I will include discussion of some recent works offering new insights on the nature of the progenitors.
