Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description of Activity
Using galaxies to study supernovae and supernovae to study galaxies.
Different types of stars end their lives in different types of supernova explosions. To date, only a handful of supernova types have been conclusively connected to their progenitor stars. For all other supernova types, including the Type Ia supernovae used in cosmology, this is still an open question. I will describe how correlations between supernova rates and global galaxy properties (such as stellar mass, metallicity, and star-formation rates) can be used to constrain the progenitors of various supernova types. I will also show how the same rates can be used to study the chemical enrichment history of the Universe in general and the Milky Way specifically. Finally, I will show how recent measurements have revealed that, for reasons still unknown, galaxy clusters are more efficient producers of Type Ia supernovae than field galaxies.