Abstract

While stars spend most of their lives as stable, fusion-powered objects, stellar birth and death involve some of the most dramatic and diverse physical processes known to astrophysicists. Stellar beginnings are shrouded in dust and difficult to observe, and the next generation of large telescopes will offer transformative opportunities to understand this first chapter of the star formation story. Stellar death is often explosive, and new data on transient objects offers great opportunities for advancing our understanding of the last chapter of the stellar story. This conference brings together experts in the fields of star formation and stellar disruptions, eruptions and explosions. We will focus on key open questions that can be solved in the upcoming era of extremely large telescopes.