Pre-Supernova Evolution of Massive Single and Binary Stars

Understand

Massive stars are essential to understand a variety of branches of astronomy including galaxy and star cluster evolution, nucleosynthesis and supernovae, pulsars and black holes.

• It has become evident that massive star evolution is very diverse, being sensitive to metallicity, binarity, rotation, and possibly magnetic fields.
• While the problem to obtain a good statistical observational database is alleviated by current large spectroscopic surveys, it remains a challenge to model these diverse paths of massive stars towards their violent end stage.
• We show that the main sequence stage offers the best opportunity to gauge the relevance of the various possible evolutionary scenarios.