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Title: It's a bumpy ride: Retracing the story of demise of massive stars
Massive stars end their lives as one of the most exotic explosions in the cosmos, i.e. supernovae. There are various kinds of supernovae based on the diverse evolution of the progenitor stars. However, mapping the various kinds of supernovae to their progenitors is a big mystery in stellar evolution and the archival survey data are limited to nearby supernovae. A unique way to trace the evolution is by studying the interaction of the supernovae shock with the slow moving immediate circumstellar medium, which is formed due to the mass loss rate of the progenitor star and hence carried the foot prints of the progenitor. It effectively works as a time machine. Since the CSM interaction mainly manifests in radio and X-ray bands, they provide a unique input to unravel the progenitor stars of supernovae. In this talk, I present the study of some supernovae from sub-GHz frequencies (using GMRT) upto X-ray energies. Our study emphasises the importance of sub-GHz frequencies, which allow us to observe these explosions for several years to decades. Thus, our late time observations allow us to probe the conditions of the star in it's early nucleosynthesis stages. We show that radio observations remain the best probe to investigate progenitor stars in their last stages leading to supernovae.
Poonam is an Astrophysicist currently working at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as an Associate Professor. She did her Masters from Aligarh Muslim University. She completed her Ph.D. at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research http://www.tifr.res.in/under Joint Astronomy Programme of Indian Institute of Science in 2005. She got the IISc best thesis award as well as INSA Young Scientist award for her PhD work. After her Ph.D., she joined as a Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at the University of Virginia from 2005 till 2008. Since 2008 onwards she was a Senior Research Associate and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. During her postdoctoral period, Poonam was awarded International Union of Pune and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Young Scientist award. Poonam is at NCRA-TIFR since 2012. Poonam is also a recipient of Swarna Jayanti fellowship. Poonam's research work focuses on end stages of massive stars and their exotic explosions leading to supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. She also studies electromagnetic signals from gravitational wave events.