11:00 am–12:00 pm ERC 401
Aaron Tohuvavohu (University of Toronto) "Seeing into the immediate post-merger environment of a neutron star collision"
The rich EM signals emitted in the seconds, minutes, and hours just before, during, and after a compact object merger encodes the magnetization of the binary components, the nature of the post-merger remnant, the neutron star equation of state, the free neutron abundance, and a wide array of other compelling physics. Unfortunately, the requirement to search, find, and classify an electromagnetic counterpart within the large GW localization regions before targeted follow-up with sensitive instruments can begin, excludes access to these earliest times, even for the most well localized GW sources. The ability to promptly localize a GW source to within the field-of-view of a narrow-field sensitive facility, would enable extraordinary science. I will discuss the science cases that require extremely early time observations, and the coordination, instruments, and analyses necessary to achieve it. These include gamma-ray imaging, novel data analysis techniques, pre-merger GW detection, and new space telescopes.
