Welcome

Thanks everyone for coming to IAU Symposium 361: Massive Stars Near and Far and contributing your new research results, ideas and plans! It was our pleasure to welcome you all to Ireland.

Participants of IAU S361 at the Slieve Russell Hotel on Thursday 12th of May 2022.

The Organising Committees are looking forward to welcoming everyone to the in-person meeting, IAU Symposium 361: Massive Stars Near and Far, to be held in Ballyconnell, Ireland in the week of 8-13 May 2022.

We held a Virtual Preview Meeting in the week of 3-7 May 2021, and are planning a face-to-face meeting in Ireland in the week of 8-13 May 2022. Thanks to everyone for your excellent contributions, which made for a very interesting meeting with great discussions after the talks.

The 361st International Astronomical Union (IAU) Symposium was planned to be held in Ballyconnell, Ireland in May 2020 (now rescheduled for 8-13 May 2022). This international conference will bring together observational and theoretical astrophysicists to discuss all aspects of massive stars, their formation, evolution and ultimately their demise as supernovae. The special focus for this conference is on massive stars in the early Universe, how they lived and died, and how they compare with massive stars in our Galaxy.

The Massive Stars Commission (G2) of the IAU’s Stars and Stellar Physics Division organises a symposium, typically held every 4 years, to present the latest research findings, discuss the status of current research in massive stars, and chart the way forward for future research. The first meeting was in Argentina in 1971, and in the last decade we organised “Massive Stars: from Alpha to Omega” in Greece (2013) and “IAUS 329: The Lives and Death Throes of Massive Stars” in New Zealand (2016).

Ireland has a young and growing research community investigating massive stars and supernovae. Its membership of the European Space Agency (ESA) and recent accession in 2018 to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) opens up tremendous opportunities for Irish scientists to access world-leading facilities that are key for gaining new insight into massive stars. The Irish astrophysics community is excited to welcome researchers from all over the world to IAU Symposium 361: Massive Stars Near and Far.

Scientific Motivation

Massive stars are crucial for the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. The past years have seen tremendous progress in our understanding of these extreme objects: from surveys of nearby galaxies and Galactic populations, deep transient surveys discovering explosions and eruptions, and the detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes and neutron stars. At the same time, computing advances are enabling multi-dimensional calculations of stellar structure and self-consistent models linking stellar interiors to supersonic winds. The next decade promises new discoveries from deeper and wider observations that will reach cosmic dawn, the formation of globular clusters and assembly of the first galaxies. By bringing together the massive stars and first stars communities in IAUS361, we will address questions with far-reaching implications such as the formation and evolution of supermassive stars as potential seeds for high-redshift quasars. The symposium will optimize the science program for JWST and E-ELT and influence future instrumentation for TMT and other planned observatories.

Key Topics

  • Recent observations and surveys of massive stars at different evolutionary states
  • Massive star populations across cosmic time
  • Massive star structure and evolution: modelling of single and binary stars
  • Physical processes in massive stars: mass loss, mass transfer, eruptions, mixing, rotation, pulsation, and magnetic fields
  • Population III stars: accretion & pre-main sequence, multiplicity, main sequence and post-main-sequence evolution, mass loss
  • Very Massive Stars and Supermassive Stars in the early Universe
  • Supernovae, Gamma-ray bursts, gravitational wave events, and other stellar endpoints
  • Feedback from massive stars