Speaker
Description
The multi-messenger era offers a wealth of opportunities to constrain the nature of compact objects such as neutron stars. New insights on such objects directly impact our understanding of the extreme astrophysical events that produce the heaviest elements we see in nature. For instance, the first ever multi-messenger event involving gravitational waves, GW170817 and its electromagnetic (EM) counterpart AT2017gfo, provided evidence for the creation of elements at least as heavy as lanthanides in the merger of two neutron stars. In order to maximize what can be learned from multi-messenger events, multi-disciplinary synergies are required and neutron star merger nucleosynthesis provides an excellent example. I will discuss some of the current challenges in modeling the nucleosynthetic outcome in mergers, with a particular emphasis on the role of the unknown nuclear properties of neutron-rich nuclei. Gravitational wave detections are not only useful for event identification and EM follow-up, but also provide the crucial information of the neutron star merger rate. I will discuss efforts which seek to answer whether mergers are the dominant source of Solar System heavy elements using gravitational wave observations.
