Contributions to IAU’s FM4: Bridging the final stages of massive stars to supernovae and transients

During the XXXII IAU General Assembly in South Africa the Focus Meeting 4: Bridging the final stages of massive stars to supernovae and transients (13-14 August 2024) had two contributions form the ASSESS team. Alceste was invited to provide an overview for variability in massive stars, while Kostas had a …

Gonzalo talks about our latest results on extreme red supergiants

Gonzalo Munoz-Sanchez arrived in Crete way in advance of the 3rd Supernova Remnants conference. That gave him the opportunity to present at the Institute of Astrophysics (FORTH) our latest results on some extreme red supergiants we have encountered during the ASSESS project. “Episodic mass loss in two evolved Red Supergiants …

Contributions to the International Conference Physics of Extreme Massive Stars

The International Conference on the Physics of Extreme Massive Stars took place on June 24-28 (2024) in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. That was a great opportunity for our PhD students Gonzalo and Evangelia to present some of our most recent results in an international conference focused on topics such …

Contributions to the Supernova Remnants III conference

Between 9 – 15 of June (2024) the ASSESS team was in Crete to help with the materialization of the third iteration of Supernova Remnants conference, which becomes probably the most important point of reference for this particular field. However, it also intersects with ours since our targets of interest …

de Wit et al. 2024: Investigating episodic mass loss in evolved massive stars: II. Physical properties of red supergiants at subsolar metallicity

S. de Wit, A.Z. Bonanos, K. Antoniadis, E. Zapartas, A. Ruiz, N. Britavskiy, E. Christodoulou, K. De, G. Maravelias, G. Munoz-Sanchez, A. Tsopela Mass loss during the red supergiant (RSG) phase plays a crucial role in the evolution of an intermediate massive star, however, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We …

Antoniadis et al. 2024: Establishing a mass-loss rate relation for red supergiants in the Large Magellanic Cloud

K. Antoniadis, A.Z. Bonanos, S. de Wit, E. Zapartas, G. Munoz-Sanchez, G. Maravelias High mass-loss rates of red supergiants (RSGs) drastically affect their evolution and final fate, yet their mass-loss mechanism remains poorly understood. Various empirical prescriptions scaled with luminosity have been derived in the literature, yielding results with a …

Observing time granted in both ESO/VLT and GTC

Our successful record of observing proposal continues also in 2024! We managed to obtain highly competitive observing time in two of the largest facilities in the world. We are going to use the FORS2 instrument at 8.2m ESO/VLT, as well as OSIRIS at 10.4m GTC. The granted time is ~17.5 …

ASSESS meets Alex de Koter, Emily Levesque, and Henry Lamers

As we are actively working on a series of forthcoming papers, we are meticulously refining the final stages of data analysis and interpretation. Especially when encountering new and exciting results we must be careful to not overlook any potential issues. While our expertise in Red Supergiants is well-established, seeking additional …