Massive stars experience a spectacular and complex evolution that shapes their structure and fate. Most are born in binary systems, where interactions through mass transfer, tidal effects, or mergers can profoundly alter their paths. Part of my research focuses on these processes of mass loss and accretion, driven by stellar winds and binary evolution during the late stages, including the role of stars ejected from binaries, and examines how they shape the stars’ final structure and the mass expelled into their surrounding environment.

When massive stars exhaust their fuel, they undergo core collapse, giving rise to spectacular supernova explosions that enrich and shape their surroundings. These events mark a key phase connecting stellar evolution with compact-object formation. My main research explores the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae, investigating how binary interactions set their final structure, how to identify binary progenitors and their companions, and how such systems shape the observed diversity of supernovae.

The compact remnants left behind, neutron stars and black holes, often remain bound in binaries that continue to evolve through mass transfer and orbital decay. These systems power X-ray binaries and can eventually merge as gravitational-wave sources. I am actively involved in studies connecting population modeling with observations of compact-object binaries, contributing to efforts that constrain key evolutionary processes and reveal the pathways linking massive stars to these extreme systems.

Credit: ESA/Hubble

Public, open-source, 1D stellar and binary structure and evolution code that has pretty much revolutionized stellar field and many others!