Stephan Rosswog, "Neutron star mergers as laboratories for extreme physics"

Thursday 2 Oct 2025, 15:15 → 16:15 Europe/Stockholm

With the  advent of gravitational wave-based multi-messenger astrophysics, the next decade holds an enormous promise to achieve major progress for a number of long-standing problems. To name just a few, these include a census of the merging compact object populations, the sources of the heaviest elements in the Universe, the properties of matter at extreme densities and temperatures, the sources of gamma-ray bursts and potential modifications of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. With the availability of a broad spectrum of observational information comes an increasing demand on the realism of the theoretical modelling of neutron star mergers, both in terms of including physical processes and in terms of spanning large length and time scales. In this talk I will provide an overview over our current understanding of these extreme-physics events.

About the speaker:

Professor Stephan Rosswog is a full professor at the Observatory Hamburg, which is part of the Physics Department of the University of Hamburg, Germany.  He earned his PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1998 after which he left Academia to model traffic flow at the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne, Germany, before taking up a postdoc position at the University of Leicester, UK, in 2000. In 2002 he was awarded a 5-year Advanced Fellowship of the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. From 2003 to 2012 he was a Professor for Astrophysics at the Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany and from 2012 to 2022 he was a faculty member at the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University to which he is still affiliated. He is the recipient of several prestigious grants and is interested in the multimessenger astrophysics of compact objects, with particular emphasis on numerical relativity, fluid dynamics, nucleosynthesis, and electromagnetic transients.