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Prof Stephen Smartt is one of the global leaders in astronomy in the field of sky surveys and astrophysical transients.  He has led innovative international projects that survey the sky to find supernovae and exploding stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope he has directly identified which stars explode as supernovae making a series of discoveries that advanced our understanding of what causes these brilliant flashes of light across the Universe.

He has discovered the most powerful of these explosions, called “super-luminous” supernovae and with his team proposed that the theory of magnetic neutron stars causes their extreme brightness. In 2017, he led one of the international teams to pinpoint the source of gravitational waves, showing that merging neutron stars can produce a brief but luminous explosion powered by radioactivity of the heavy elements.