Speaker
Description
The ground-breaking discovery of the gravitational wave transient GW170817 provided direct and unambiguous evidence linking a short duration gamma-ray burst to the merger of two neutron stars and to the kilonova AT2017gfo. This multi-messenger event handed us a powerful new tool to answer fundamental questions about the universe: from the behavior of matter at supranuclear densities to the cosmic production of heavy r-process metals and the expansion rate of the universe.
However, our traditional picture of the high-energy sky was recently challenged by observations of long GRBs followed by luminous kilonovae, short GRBs produced by magnetar giant flares, and mysterious fast X-ray transients with little or no gamma-rays. In this talk, I will discuss how future gravitational wave observations will help us map the broad diversity of stellar explosions and their electromagnetic manifestations, providing novel constraints on nuclear physics and cosmology.
