Exploring (a bit of) the Transient DiversityHYBRID

Due to huge technological improvements, we have witnessed a tremendous branching of the astronomical transient family over the last three decades, during which a number of new, often exotic, astronomical transients have been discovered. As they could not be fitted into the standard transient picture, it then became clear that the stellar evolution paradigm was (and still is) missing some of the physics that governs the last stages of many massive stars’ lives. I will briefly review the current picture of the transient zoo and focus on two particular types of new, exotic transients, i.e. superluminous supernovae and kilonovae; in particular, I will discuss some of the major issues related to their study and I will present some recents developments in both fields.