Jorick S. Vink – författare

IAU Symposium 361 brought together observational and theoretical astrophysicists to discuss all aspects of massive stars: their formation, evolution, demise as supernovae and GRBs, and gravitational waves from mergers of stellar-remnant neutron stars and black holes. The special focus was on massive stars in the early Universe, how they compare with massive stars in our Galaxy and with low-metallicity galaxies in the local Universe, anticipating new results from HST's ULLYSES and JWST. The volume includes contributions from the virtual preview meeting (May 2021) held online due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the in-person meeting (May 2022) held in Ballyconnell, Co. Cavan, Ireland. More than 200 participants from 32 countries contributed through highlight talks on exciting new results and wide-ranging contributed talks and posters covering the latest research from cool supergiants to hot Wolf-Rayet stars.

This book presents the status of research on very massive stars in the Universe. While it has been claimed that stars with over 100 solar masses existed in the very early Universe, recent studies have also discussed the existence and deaths of stars up to 300 solar masses in the local Universe. This represents a paradigm shift for the stellar upper-mass limit, which may have major implications far beyond the field of stellar physics.The book comprises 7 chapters, which describe this discipline and provide sufficient background and introductory content for graduate (PhD) students and researchers from different branches of astronomy to be able to enter this exciting new field of very massive stars.