Time Domain and Multi-Messenger (TDAMM) Astrophysics: An Explosive Example of Community Driven Science Talk by Chris Fryer
The Universe is bursting with activity with hundreds of cosmic explosions occurring every second. These explosions provide astronomers a window into the universe, studying everything from the production of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) to the synthesis of the heavy elements in the Milky Way (including iron, gold and uranium). These explosions are typically produced in extreme environments (densities exceeding nuclear densities where matter could be broken down into their constituent quarks and temperatures 10,000 times that of the core of the sun). As such, these explosions allow astrophysicists to probe fundamental physics in extreme conditions. With new survey telescopes, astronomers expect to discover over 100,000 transients per year. Despite the development of a broad range of ground- and space-based observatories, astronomers are ill-prepared to study even a small fraction of these transients.
To successfully study these objects, astronomers must work together with a broad range of expertise in fluid-dynamics, radiation transport, atomic physics, nuclear physics, and plasma physics that require coupling experimental and modeling expertise. Such efforts require a village, not the typically-funded Principal Investigator led science studies and there is a growing realization that science progress and innovation in this field requires community-led efforts. Here we will discuss how the astronomy community, working with NNSA scientists, are poised to dramatically advance our understanding of time domain astrophysics through broad community-driven research. These advances will provide a window into the Universe we live in and the physics governing it.
$10 admission; free for BSMA members (you can become a member on our Join Us page).
Thursday, April 16, 6-8pm at the Bradbury Science Museum. Free childcare available! Stay tuned for ways to register for childcare.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Chris Fryer holds a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Arizona (1996) and a degree in mathematics and astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley (1992). He came to LANL permanently in 2000 (he first visited LANL in 1994 as a graduate student) as a computational physicist and is currently the director of the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos. Fryer has contributed deeply to the understanding of supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and binary stellar evolution. At LANL, he studies a broad range of computational physics problems in turbulence, radiation hydrodynamics, nuclear physics and plasma physics. For his work both in astrophysics and the LANL missions, Fryer was made a laboratory fellow as well as a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received the E.O. Lawrence award for his work advancing fusion and plasma sciences (2014), the Marcel Grossmann Award for Relativistic Astrophysics (2024) and the American Physical Society’s Hans Bethe award for nuclear astrophysics (2025).
