Topic: heavy elements

This lecture follows massive stars through successive nuclear-burning stages to core collapse. It explains how supernova explosions expel material and enrich the interstellar environment with heavy elements. The discussion then turns to compact remnants, black-hole formation and observational opportunities provided by surviving binary companions.

The distribution of stellar masses shapes how galaxies evolve, how heavy elements are produced, and how stars affect their surrounding planets. This seminar reviews the observations used to measure that distribution and the physical explanations proposed for the relative abundance of low-mass and high-mass stars, whose lifetimes and luminosities differ markedly.