Pre-Supernova Evolution of Massive Single and Binary Stars

TL;DR

This paper reviews the diverse evolutionary paths of massive stars, emphasizing the importance of the main sequence stage and recent observational advances in understanding their end stages, supernovae, and related phenomena.

Contribution

It synthesizes current knowledge on massive star evolution, highlighting the role of metallicity, binarity, rotation, and magnetic fields, and discusses recent observational progress in linking progenitors to supernova types.

Findings

Main sequence stage is crucial for understanding evolutionary scenarios.

Wolf-Rayet stars provide key clues to post-main sequence evolution.

Recent transient discoveries help map progenitors to supernova types.

Abstract

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. This also allows to sketch the post-main sequence evolution of massive stars, for which observations of Wolf-Rayet stars give essential clues. Recent supernova discoveries due to the current boost in transient searches allow tentative mappings of progenitor models with supernova types, including pair instability supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.