Speaker
Description
Spectra of kilonovae, radioactively-powered electromagnetic radiation from neutron star mergers, provide us with information of r-process nucleosynthesis. In the photospheric phase, which photons diffuse out from optically thick matter, absorption features in the spectra can be used to identify individual elements. However, the decode of the spectra for the first detected kilonova GW170817/AT2017gfo has not been complete, and the abundances of synthesized elements in this event is not yet clear. In the talk, I will first introduce the difficulty of the identification of elements in the photospheric spectra. Then, I will discuss what information we can extract from absorption features mainly based on our work but as well as other work on the photospheric kilonova spectra.
