Superluminous Supernovae

Superluminous Supernovae mark the spectacular deaths of massive stars, and are up to 100-times brighter than regular supernovae.

I will discuss the mechanisms which can lead to such events, and their relations to other extreme stellar transients, like hypernovae, gamma-ray bursts and merging binary black holes. The preference of some of these types of explosions to occur in low metallicity galaxies holds the clue to understand which type of progenitor stars are capable to produce them.

We will examine suggested progenitor models and draw conclusions for the evolution of massive stars in the Early Universe.