The Lives of Stars, or Astronomers as Paparazzi

Using NOAO facilities, astronomers from Lowell Observatory have acted as “stellar paparazzi”, managing to identify hundreds of rare yellow supergiants and their more long-lived descendants, the red supergiants, in two neighboring galaxies. These newly identified stellar populations provide an important constraint on the theoretical models which describe how these stars change from blue, to yellow and then to red. The behavior of the models in this phase can influence theoretical predictions, including what types of stars explode as supernova.