Thursday, November 12 12:45 PM - 2:00 PM
On-Campus Event - — Harney 136
"Beyond Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Landscape of Relativistic Stellar Explosions Revealed by High-Cadence Optical Surveys"
Dr. Anna Y.Q. Ho, Cornell Center for Astrophysics & Planetary Science, Department of Astronomy
Thursday, November 12, 2026
12:45-2:00pm – HR 136 (coffee hour beginning at 12:15pm)
For half a century, relativistic outflows from the deaths of massive stars have been discovered primarily through their high-energy emission, as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). However, it has long been hypothesized that GRBs represent the tip of the iceberg of relativistic stellar explosions, including baryon-loaded outflows and jets directed away from Earth. I will show that the large grasp of optical time-domain surveys has recently made it possible to test this hypothesis. I will review the emerging landscape of phenomena established by triaging hundreds of thousands of nightly alerts and pursuing multiwavelength campaigns on timescales of hours to years. Determining the physical origins of these phenomena, and their connections to the well-studied GRBs, will be enabled in the coming decade by the expansion of high-cadence survey capabilities across the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly into the X-rays, UV, and radio.
Anna Ho is the Richards Family Assistant Professor at Cornell University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT, her PhD from Caltech in 2020, and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley before moving to Cornell in 2022. She has received fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Her research interests are in the lives and deaths of stars and the physics of those phenomena and other energetic cosmic events.