Chasing dead stars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)

Presented by Anna Sippel on 19th April 2013.Stars don't shine forever - and especially very massive stars don't live very long before ending their lives as neutron stars or black holes. In this lecture we will focus on the endpoints of the evolution of such massive stars and how a black hole can be formed during a stellar explosion called supernova. We will discuss how black holes of different sizes can be detected under certain circumstances, and implications for theories that stellar-mass black holes could be the seeds of supermassive black holes we find at the centres of galaxies like our Milky Way.