Colloquium - Jared Goldberg’s “Twinkle Twinkle Dying Star”

Event details Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026 Time: 12:45 PM Location: Bryant Space Science Center Room 217 Type: Lecture / Workshop Tags: Seminar About this event Speaker: Jared Goldberg, Flatiron Institute Title: Twinkle Twinkle Dying Star Abstract: Massive stars, such as the notoriously unruly Red Supergiant Betelgeuse, shape their environments throughout their dynamic lives and often-explosive ends. While physical processes deep in their cores such as fusion and neutrino emission determine their fates, their outer envelopes mediate everything we observe. I will discuss our advances constraining these volatile stellar end stages, with emphasis on the observable signatures of envelope dynamics. The era of time-domain astronomy is well upon us, and stellar astrophysics is undergoing a renaissance due to the massive amounts of nightly data combined with numerical experiments using open-source spherically symmetric ("1D") stellar modeling software. Increasingly, however, observations indicate inherently 3D effects manifesting near massive stars' tumultuous surfaces. While full-star birth-to-death simulations are still a century away, advanced computational capabilities enable large-scale Radiation-Hydrodynamics simulations spanning dynamically relevant timescales for both stellar fluctuations and supernova explosions. The highly-turbulent envelope yields a host of dynamic phenomena: variability from large-scale convection, episodic mass loss, wind-companion interactions, and a variety of emission signatures during the eventual supernova. I will also highlight ongoing efforts to bridge simulation regimes and survey-level observations, towards realizing the scientific potential of the ever-growing wealth of spatially- and temporally-resolved data. 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM 217 Bryant Space Science Center Official event details: https://calendar.ufl.edu/clas_astronomy/event/57116-colloquium-jared-goldbergs-twinkle-twinkle-dying-star