Stars - gone in a day!

Stars - gone in a day!

We are delighted to welcome Prof Andreja Gomboc from Slovenia to present the 2025 John Porter Memorial Lecture.

Stars are giant spheres of hot hydrogen and helium, which shine for millions to billions of years. And yet, they can get destroyed in less than a day!

At the end of their lifetimes, massive stars can produce a gamma ray burst – the most violent explosion known in the Universe. On the other hand, an unfortunate star of any type and age, which happens to get too close to a massive black hole, can get torn apart by the black hole’s tidal force.

In this lecture, you will discover the different ways in which stars can get destroyed, and how astronomers catch and study these short lasting events with space and ground based telescopes.

Andreja Gomboc is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She received her PhD in Physics at the University of Ljubljana in 2001, followed in 2002-2004 by Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the Liverpool John Moores University, UK. In 2021-22 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Washington, USA.

Prof. Gomboc’s main fields of research are astrophysical transients (tidal disruptions of stars in vicinity of massive black holes, gamma ray bursts, electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events). Since 2016 she is leading Slovenian participation in the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

She is a member of the European Astronomical Society Council, International Astronomical Union, Division D Steering Committee, and MSCA COFUND SMASH Executive Board. Prof. Gomboc is also an active science communicator, co-founder of GoChile, the first Slovenian telescope in Chile, and co-editor of the webportal Portal v vesolje.

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