Title: GW170817: A Golden Neutron Star Merger
Speaker:Ryan Chornock, Ohio University
Abstract: On August 17th of last year, the Advanced LIGO/VIRGO gravitational wave observatories detected their first binary neutron star merger. The discovery of an associated electromagnetic counterpart has been a milestone event in astronomy because it definitively answers several outstanding questions. I will discuss some of the astrophysical implications that result from making this connection and what we can learn about the merger process from the electromagnetic source, with a focus on what can be gleaned from studies of the thermal component responsible for the optical and near-infrared emission at early times. In particular, observations of this "kilonova" have shown that the merger was a major site of the r-process nucleosynthesis that produces many of the heavy elements in the universe, including gold, platinum, and uranium.
Host: Tchekhovskoy
Speaker Schedule
Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium
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