The Landscape of Massive Stellar Death

The time-domain sky is unexpectedly diverse: over the past decade we have come to realize that stars can explode in a wide and diverse manner of ways that had not previously been predicted.

Using the vast legacy supernova data set provided by the Zwicky Transient Facility, we will provide a fully complete picture of the classifications and sub-classifications of all types of stellar death occurring in the nearby universe, measure their relative rates and luminosity functions, and connect immediate observables (supernova type, peak luminosity, characteristics timescale, and location within the host galaxy) to fundamental properties of the star (mass, lifetime, and pre-explosion stellar evolution) in order to improve our insights into what leads different (massive) stars along different pathways from birth until death.