Massive stars have luminosities typically 1000 to 10000 times that of the sun and consequently burn their nuclear fuel very quickly. In turn this leads to them having relatively short lifetimes (typically a few million years) at the end of which they develop an iron core, collapse and explode as spectacular supernovae. There is a vast diversity in supernovae types, and theories of the explosions predict that these are related to the type of star that from which they originated. Currently over 2000 supernovae in the nearby Universe have been discovered but only three progenitor stars have ever been identified.

Understanding the evolution of massive stars and their deaths as supernovae are core research areas at QUB. Stephen Smartt leads several programs using the Hubble Space Telescope and several large ground-based telescopes includinding the Very Large Telscope at ESO in Chile, and the 8m Gemini telescope. He has just taken up a EURYI award - a grant from the European Young Inverstigator programme to build a research team working on aspects of supernovae, massive stars and the link to other phenomenae in the Universe. This grant is worth 1.2Meuros, and will fund Stephen and two 5-year postdocs until 2010. In addition there is significant PPARC and Leverhulme funding. Rubina Kotak joined the group as a lecturer in January 2007, making a group of 10 people working on supernovae and their progenitors.

We have joined the first phase of the Pan-STARRS project as a UK consortium involving the Universities of Durham and Edinbrugh to exploit PS1 - a 1.8m telescope with a 7 sqaure degree field of view and 1.4 gigapixel camera. We are interested in all types of nearby explosive transients especially core-collapse supernovae, luminous blue variable outbursts and links to gamma-ray burst events.

We also work on undertsanding Type Ia supernovae, which have been used in to measure the geometry of the distant Universe and infer the existence of dark energy. We are involved in the EU funded Research Training Network on "The Physics of Type Ia Supernova Explosions"