Special Session SS14  27 June 2022

Gravitational Wave and Multi-messenger Astronomy: current results and future perspectives

News: The opening of gravitational-wave (GW) and multi-messenger (MM) astronomy demonstrates a transformative potential for astrophysics and fundamental physics. An enormous amount of information has been gathered by the GW detections made by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo interferometers. The next generation of GW detector Einstein Telescope, thanks to its improved design, will explore the Universe through GW along its cosmic history up to the cosmological dark ages.

Aims and scope

Gravitational-wave observations have enabled us to unveil the physics of binary systems of stellar-black holes and neutron stars, to test general relativity, to probe their association with gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae impacting relativistic astrophysics, nuclear physics, and nucleosynthesis in the Universe. While many more GW events are anticipated in the next few years, the discovery and multi-wavelength follow up of their counterparts is a challenging endeavor for current facilities and strategies.

The next generation detector Einstein Telescope will bring the gravitational wave astronomy revolution to a full realization. Thanks to an order of magnitude better sensitivity and a wider accessible frequency band, ET will enormously increase the number of detections of binary systems of black-holes and neutron stars, also exploring the regime of intermediate massive black-holes. It will make it possible for precise GW astronomy and to access the distant Universe. It will probe the physics near black-hole horizons (from tests of general relativity to quantum gravity), help understanding the nature of dark matter (such as primordial black holes, axion clouds, dark matter accreting on compact objects), the nature of dark energy, test possible modifications of general relativity at cosmological scales and beyond the standard model particle physics.

In this special session which will cover current and next generation of GW detectors, we wish to gather the scientific community engaged in three key research topics which constitute the pillars of multi-messenger astronomy: 1) the capabilities of present and future gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observatories which guarantee the detection of gravitational wave and electromagnetic signals locally and up to the cosmic dawn; 2) the current GW and MM observational results and science perspectives for the next generation of GW observatories; 3) the theoretical challenges that can be undertaken with larger sample of gravitational waves and their electromagnetic counterparts expected from now to the ET era.

This session aims at giving the forum to establish more direct collaborations between the instrumental community devoted to the design and development of the instrument with the scientists interested in observations and theory in order to optimize the process of interaction.

Programme

Talks about instruments, observations, and theory will be organized within a special session with three slots of 1.5 hours. We will give an overview of the past GW detections and their impact in astrophysics and fundamental physics, and we will explore perspectives and challenges for the next runs of observations of current detectors, and for the next generation of GW observatories. We envisage to have review talks on instrumentation, observations, theory followed by contributed presentations on the on-going research projects.

Invited speakers

  • Alessandra Corsi (Texas Tech University, TBC)
  • Viviana Fafone (Universitŕ degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata/INFN)
  • Stefan Hild (Maastricht University/Nikhef)
  • Astrid Lamberts (Observatoire de la Co?te d?Azur/CNRS)
  • Patricia Schmidt (University of Birmingham)
  • Om Sharan Salafia (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera)
  • Nial Tanvir (University of Leicester)

    • Scientific organisers

    Marica Branchesi (IT) (Chair), José Antonio Font (ES) (Chair), Andreas Freise (NL) (co-Chair), Pablo Cerdá-Durán (ES) (co-chair), Giancarlo Ghirlanda (IT) (co-Chair), Susanna Vergani (FR) (co-Chair), Marie-Anne Bizouard (FR), Sarah Caudill (NL), Selma de Mink (DE), Michele Maggiore (CH), Raffaella Margutti (US), Ornella Piccini (IT), Ed Porter (FR), Mairi Sakellaridou (UK), Stephen Smartt (UK).

    Contact

    • marica.branchesi@gssi.it
    • j.antonio.font @ uv.es

      Updated on Thu Mar 03 09:28:01 CET 2022
European Astronomical Society