Predicting the nature of supernova progenitors.

Stars more massive than about 8 solar masses end their lives as a supernova (SN), an event of fundamental importance Universe-wide. The physical properties of massive stars before the SN event are very uncertain, both from theoretical and observational perspectives. In this article, I briefly review recent efforts to predict the nature of stars before death, in particular, by performing coupled stellar evolution and atmosphere modelling of single stars in the pre-SN stage. These models are able to predict the high-resolution spectrum and broadband photometry, which can then be directly compared with the observations of core-collapse SN progenitors. The predictions for the spectral types of massive stars before death can be surprising. Depending on the initial mass and rotation, single star models indicate that massive stars die as red supergiants, yellow hypergiants, luminous blue variables and Wolf-Rayet stars of the WN and WO subtypes. I finish by assessing the detectability of SN Ibc progenitors.This article is part of the themed issue 'Bridging the gap: from massive stars to supernovae'.

Eta Carinae's Thermal X-ray Tail Measured with XMM-Newton and NuSTAR.

The evolved, massive highly eccentric binary system, η Car, underwent a periastron passage in the summer of 2014. We obtained two coordinated X-ray observations with XMM-Newton and NuSTAR during the elevated X-ray flux state and just before the X-ray minimum flux state around this passage. These NuSTAR observations clearly detected X-ray emission associated with η Car extending up to ~50 keV for the first time. The NuSTAR spectrum above 10 keV can be fit with the bremsstrahlung tail from a kT ~6 keV plasma. This temperature is ΔkT ~2 keV higher than those measured from the iron K emission line complex, if the shocked gas is in collisional ionization equilibrium. This result may suggest that the companion star's pre-shock wind velocity is underestimated. The NuSTAR observation near the X-ray minimum state showed a gradual decline in the X-ray emission by 40% at energies above 5 keV in a day, the largest rate of change of the X-ray flux yet observed in individual η Car observations. The column density to the hardest emission component, N H ~1024 H cm-2, marked one of the highest values ever observed for η Car, strongly suggesting the increased obscuration of the wind-wind colliding X-ray emission by the thick primary stellar wind prior to superior conjunction. Neither observation detected the power-law component in the extremely hard band that INTEGRAL and Suzaku observed prior to 2011. The power-law source might have faded before these observations.