Daily Image
07-03-2018
ARGO: the Apertif Radio - Gravitational wave Observatory
| Submitter: | Joeri van Leeuwen |
| Description: | Today 10:15 cookies to celebrate Joeri's NWO Vici Grant A few days ago, NWO announced the Vici grant winners. ARGO, the Apertif Radio - Gravitational wave Observatory is among the selected proposals. Today we will celebrate this occasion with cake! In ARGO, we will search for radio-afterglow and prompt emission accompanying gravitational-wave events. Have a look at the movie in the ASTRON press release for an impression of the science goals and method. Shown there is how the lights of the night sky have formed our view of the cosmos. Together with matter, these electromagnetic waves fill the Universe. Yet the metric of space and time are equally substantial and real - we feel their curvature as gravity. We can now even fathom our Universe through the swell of this very fabric of space-time: gravitational waves. Mergers of black holes and neutron stars whip up these waves. From recent direct gravitational-wave detections of merging black holes, we know their masses well, and the merger distance roughly; but we have basically no idea where in the sky they took place. Black hole mergers are electromagnetically dark. That great observational challenge meant the impact of these cosmic explosions remained an mystery - we had no clue in which direction to look. Yet, we now know mergers involving neutron stars do produce emission, especially in radio. Our overall aim in ARGO is to understand the physics governing the interior and the leviathan magnetic fields of these stars, and their spiral-in. We next want to see the powerful explosion of gravitational, electromagnetic and pressure waves collide, in the blast region. For this we aim to discover and interpret the accompanying afterglows and electromagnetic bursts. We will localise the events 100,000 times more accurately than gravitational-wave detectors can, to understand their origin through deep, targeted studies and follow-up. |
| Copyright: | JvL |
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