Gravity Seminars

Neutron star mergers are Nature's ultimate supercolliders, where two massive objects—each containing around 10^58 nucleons—collide at a quarter of the speed of light. These cosmic events offer a unique opportunity to probe the properties of matter under extreme conditions. In this talk, I will discuss our current understanding of the physics of these phenomena and of the way in which their dynamics is imprinted on their gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signals. I will present recent constraints on the properties of dense matter from neutron star merger observations, and I will highlight the potential of next-generation gravitational-wave experiments to provide precision tests of QCD in the nonperturbative regime. Finally, I will talk about theoretical challenges in this field and of our efforts to overcome them.