The Renaissance of Astrophysics: A landscape of opportunities in the era of observations with gravitational waves and light

Astronomical transients are events that appear and disappear in the night sky, and are signposts of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar deaths, stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes, and mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Thanks to new and improved observational facilities, we can now sample the night sky with unprecedented time and depth across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond. This effort has led to the discovery of new types of stellar explosions, revolutionized our understanding of phenomena that we thought we already knew, and enabled the first insights into the physics of neutron star mergers with gravitational waves and light. In this talk I will review some very recent developments that resulted from our new capability to study the universe utilizing gravitational waves and light.

Speaker: Dr. Raffaella Margutti, UC Berkeley