Speaker
Description
A new exploration of the Universe has recently started through gravitational-wave observations. On August 17, 2017, the first observation of gravitational waves from the inspiral and merger of a binary neutron-star system by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo network, followed 1.7 s later by a weak short gamma-ray burst detected by the Fermi and INTEGRAL satellites initiated the most extensive world-wide observing campaign which led to the detection of multi-wavelength electromagnetic counterparts. Multi-messenger discoveries are revealing the enigmas of the most energetic transients in the sky, probing neutron-stars physics, relativistic astrophysics, nuclear physics, nucleosynthesis, and cosmology. The talk will give an overview of the astrophysical implications of the gravitational-wave and multi-messenger observations, the prospects and challenges of the current and future gravitational-wave detectors.
