Shane Larson

Northwestern University, October 20, 1:00 pm

The landscape of multi-messenger astronomy in the LISA era

Multi-messenger astronomy has a long and colorful history as a tool for understanding the Cosmos. The recent simultaneous detection of gravitational waves with a short gamma-ray burst has galvanized the attention of astronomers, illuminating the tremendous scientific gains that can come from multi-messenger astronomy. In the next decade, the LISA gravitational-wave observatory will open up a new era of astronomy, increasing the number of known sources in the gravitational-wave catalog by several orders of magnitude. Among those sources will be thousands of multi-messenger systems that astronomers can mine for information about the Universe. In this talk, we will examine the complementary of gravitational-wave observations with other techniques. We’ll discuss the power of combining both gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations, and give several vignettes of how the two observational mediums may be used in concert to probe a variety of different astrophysical phenomena.