Published: 15 October 2021
Astronomical transients are signposts of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar deaths, stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes, and mergers of compact objects. Thanks to new and improved observational facilities we can now sample the night sky with unprecedented temporal cadence and sensitivity across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond. This effort has led to the discovery of new types of astronomical transients, 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 the speaker will review some very recent developments that resulted from our capability to acquire a truly panchromatic view of transient astrophysical phenomena.
Raffaella Margutti is a Professor in Astrophysics at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. Afterwards, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a James Arthur Research Associate at the New York University. Before moving to UC Berkley, she was assistant and afterwards associate professor at the Northwestern University. Raffaella Margutti received numerous awards, among them the New Horizons in Physics Prize (2022). Time Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. Supernovae, tidal disruption events, transient large astronomical surveys, gravitational wave sources and neutron star mergers, gamma-ray bursts. Her overarching goal is to acquire truly panchromatic observations of transients across the electromagnetic spectrum and advance our understanding of: (i) the nature of the compact object remnants; (ii) particle acceleration at newtonian and transrelativistic shocks; (iii) mass-loss events in the decades before stellar demise.
This webinar was recorded on October 14, 2021
