A Graduate Student studying astrophysics at Caltech
Studying the Universe
Multimessenger Astronomy
Every day light reaches us, some of it having traveled from across the solar system, some of it having traveled across the Milky Way. Every once in a while, a "new star" is visible to humans on earth, signaling a massive astrophysical change. It has only been recently that humans have seen the effects of such a massive event both in light, and gravitational waves in GW170817. This represents the first observation of a binary neutron star merger (at least, that we've been able to identify as such). It's possible people long ago saw such an event in our own galaxy and wondered what the cause was As humans improve our ability to see the sky, our view of these changes in the universe will improve as well. I aim to help people across the world better understand the way the sky changes, and what it tells us about everything else in the universe.
One of the remarkable things that we can learn from studying neutron stars is the properties of the matter inside of them. This matter is extremely dense, about a million billion times denser than water. A teaspoon of it would weigh as much as a mountain. The properties of this matter are in principle determined by the standard model of particle physics, but solving the equations of motion of this matter is impossible with modern computational techniques (and likely will be for a long time). Noneththeless, the large scale structure of neutron stars is determined by the properties of this matter, so by observing neutron stars, we can test theories of how this matter behaves; if neutron stars look one way, then it must be the case that the matter inside is compatible with them looking that way. We are still only in the infancy of these studies, and many more promising neutron star observations promise to reveal much more about what is going on. One of the most powerful tools to learn about this matter, is via multimessenger observations of neutron stars.