Pair-Instability Explosions: observational evidence

Understand

It has been theoretically predicted many decades ago that extremely massive stars that develop large oxygen cores will become dynamically unstable, due to electron-positron pair production.

• The collapse of such oxygen cores leads to powerful thermonuclear explosions that unbind the star and can produce, in some cases, many solar masses of radioactive 56Ni.
• For many years, no examples of this process were observed in nature.
• Here, I briefly review recent observations of luminous supernovae that likely result from pair-instability explosions, in the nearby and distant Universe.