Title: Exploring the Universe by Combining Gravitational Wave and Electromagnetic Counterpart Searches
Abstract: The fourth observing run (O4) of the global LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network of gravitational wave (GW) detectors is currently underway. Joint detections of GWs and electromagnetic counterparts are necessary in advancing our understanding of the universe and the use of rapid wide-field optical telescopes has become increasingly important for the detection and characterisation of cosmic events. I will explore the role of networks of wide-field optical telescopes for providing rapid and precise follow-up observations of GW events.
One particular instrument that I'll highlight is GOTO (Gravitational-wave optical transient observer), a network of wide-field small robotic telescopes located in the northern (ROM, La Palma) and southern (Siding Spring Observatory, Australia) hemispheres. It rapidly and autonomously observes the sky in response to alerts from ground-based GW and space-based gamma-ray detectors.
I will also briefly highlight outstanding scientific puzzles that can be addressed with joint GW and electromagnetic counterpart searches, including measuring the Hubble constant using GW "standard sirens", constraining the neutron star equation of state, and constraining (non)deviations of General Relativity. I will examine realistic scenarios of what we might expect observationally during the second part of O4, and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead for GW astronomy during the O4 run and beyond.
About the Speaker: Dr Kendall Ackley is Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She earned her PhD in Physics at the University of Florida on gravitational-wave astronomy and completed her first postdoc at Monash University with OzGrav (2017-2021), the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery. At the University of Warwick, she’s working on the Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO: https://goto-observatory.org/), a suite of wide-field robotic optical telescopes dedicated to searching for counterpart to gravitational-wave events. She is a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Scientific Collaboration and is the coordinator of the GW/Kilonova Science working group and the Scheduling/Strategy working group in GOTO. Her work spans diverse set of interests and lies at the boundary of astronomy and physics. She is focused on time-domain astrophysics, multi-messenger astronomy, optical and near-infrared instrumentation, gravitational-wave data analysis, compact objects (neutron stars, black holes) physics, observations of gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae, Bayesian inference methods, and computer vision/machine learning. She played an instrumental role in the detection of gravitational waves. She was involved in the first discovery of gravitational waves (GW150914) and led the observations and efforts for interpretation of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817. For these efforts she received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016), Gruber Cosmology Prize (2016), Bruno Rossi Prize (2017), Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research (2017), RAS Group Achievement Award (2017).
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