Regina Caputo, "Cosmic Explosions and Cosmic Accelerators"

Tuesday 2 Jun 2020, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Berlin

Zoom

Gamma-ray astronomy is the science of the extremes. The summer of 2017 ushered in the era of multimessenger astrophysics and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been at the forefront. We can now observe the universe not only with light, but also with gravitational waves and particles. When two stars made of the densest material in the universe smashed together, Fermi observed a burst of gamma rays. At the same time, the gravitational wave from this explosion was observed with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), setting off a campaign by nearly every telescope in the world to observe the resulting event. Within a few months of this discovery, Fermi also observed a distant galaxy accelerating particles to extreme energies resulting in more gamma rays than it had ever produced before. During this time, the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory detected a high energy neutrino telling us about the fundamental components of the accelerated particles. These messengers observed jointly with the gamma-rays from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have revolutionized our understanding of the extreme universe.