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NGC3949 : Hubble Space Telescope image taken by S. Smartt (Credit : NASA/ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team STSCI/AURA)
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I am a professor in the Astrophysics
Research Centre in the School
of Maths and Physics at Queen's
University Belfast. I work on
exploding stars and unusual transients in the
Universe. My group run large sky survey projects
such as Pan-STARRS and ATLAS
to scan the sky and find transients that stretch
our understanding of how stars die. We showed
that the first ever discovery of an
electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational
wave source (GW170817) produced heavy
radioactive elements and was consistent
with models of a kilonova from a pair of merging
neutron stars
(see our paper here). I was
elected as Fellow
of the Royal Society in 2020 and was
awarded the Royal
Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Physical
and Mathematical Sciences in 2018. |
My group works on supernovae
and the deaths of massive
stars. We have leading roles in two large
international projects to study supernovae and the
transient Universe. We are partners in the Pan-STARRS
project and I was PI and Survey
Director of PESSTO, the
Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient
Objects. and its successor
ePESSTO.
I am a previous holder of a European
Young Investigator (EURYI) Award and PPARC
Advanced Fellowship and held positions at
the Institute of
Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and the
Isaac Newton Group
of Telescopes on La Palma.
For the last decade I have been searching for the progenitors core-collapse supernovae in images of galaxies taken before explosion, much like the one of NGC3949 shown above, that I took with the Hubble Space Telescope. The results of this work were published in Smartt, Eldridge, Crockett & Maund (2009, The death of massive stars I) and in Eldridge, Fraser, Smartt, Maund, Crockett (2013, The death of massive stars II). My review article on this topic for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 2009 be accessed here : "Progenitors of core-collapse supernovae", S.J. Smartt, 2009, ARA&A, 47, 63 . I have published an updated review here : Observational Constraints on the Progenitors of Core-collapse supernovae : The case for missing high mass stars, 2015, PASA, 32, 16
Astrophysics
Research Centre
School of Mathematics and Physics
Queen's University Belfast,
Belfast BT7 1NN,
Northern Ireland UK
Tel (direct) +44 2890 973588
Tel (recept.) +44 2890 973941
Email:S.Smartt_AT_qub_ac_uk
Directions to my office : Main Physics building, top
floor, Room 02.018