Joke Claeys

I study the progenitor evolution towards supernovae. For my master research I studied the progenitor evolution of type IIb SNe and for my PhD research I mainly focus on type Ia SNe. Type Ia SNe are thermonuclear explosions of CO WDs. The light curves of these class of SNe are very homogeneous. Therefore it is generally expected that the explosions are explosions of WDs which approach the critical -Chandrasekhar- mass. But is the progenitor evolution of this class of SNe really so homogeneous? Are we able to reproduce the observed rate with this assumption?

For the detailed (binary) stellar evolution, we work with the stellar evolution code STARS (originally developed by Eggleton, 1971). The population synthesis code we use is based on SSE and BSE (Hurley et al., 2000,2002), in combination with a synthetic nucleosynthesis model (Izzard et al., 2004, 2006, 2009).

This website is still work in progress (20/05/2011)