Speaker: Phillip Podsialovski (Oxford University)
It has becoming increasingly clear in recent years that there
is more to supernovae than just two explosion types. In this
talk I will first review the present classification scheme and
discuss the origin of some of the observed diversity. In
particular, I will demonstrate the importance of binarity for
understanding the diversity, using SN 1987A and SN 1993J as prime
examples. It is well established now that hypernovae, a more
energetic supernova type, are connected with long-duration
gamma-ray bursts. They only represent a small fraction of all
supernovae, but the evolution that leads to these dramatic and
rare events is not all understood. While it is known that most
neutron stars receive a large supernova kick when they are
born, there is also clear evidence that there is a subgroup of
neutron stars, apparently those born in close binaries, that
do not, suggesting a different explosion mechanism. Througout
the talk, I will emphasize the implications of the
uncertainties of our basic understanding of supernovae for
modelling the evolution of galaxies.