Seminar: Multi-wavelength perspective on red supergiants: from stellar evolution to the Great Dimming
- Date: 4 June 2025, 14:00–15:00
- Location: Ångström Laboratory, Å101190
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Daisuke Taniguchi, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
- Organiser: Division of Astronomy and Space Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy
- Contact person: Simon Barton
Red supergiants are a class of massive stars soon ending their lives as supernovae. Their properties, such as mass-loss rates and effective temperatures, are key to understanding both massive star evolution and the nature of resulting supernovae. Owing to their high luminosity, red supergiants also serve as useful tracers of stellar chemical abundances in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Multi-wavelength observations are essential to probe the different components of red supergiants and to constrain the physical parameters of these complex systems. In this talk, I will present our recent results on red supergiants, including: (1) the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse, investigated using optical/infrared photometry from the Himawari-8 meteorological satellite [1]; and (2) accurate measurements of effective temperatures and chemical abundances of nearby red supergiants based on near-infrared high-resolution spectroscopy [2,3].
[1] Taniguchi et al. (2022), Nat. Astron, 6, 930