Session E01: Astrophysics

High Energy Neutrino Astrophysics with Radio Techniques

Multimessenger astronomy has entered an exciting new era with the recent discovery of both gravitational waves and cosmic neutrinos. I will focus on extremely energetic neutrinos as particles that can uniquely probe the most extreme astrophysics sources at cosmic distances, as well as fundamental physics in an unexplored energy regime. While optical Cerenkov radiation remains the most powerful strategy for neutrino detection over a broad energy range, the radio Cerenkov technique has emerged in the last two decades as the most promising for a long-term program to push the neutrino frontier by over a factor of 1000 in energy. I will present the latest results from the field of high energy neutrino astrophysics, with a focus on the balloon-borne ANITA experiment and the in-ice South Pole array ARA. I will also give an overview of the many exciting projects in this field that are on the horizon, and their anticipated impact in terms of the astrophysics and particle physics questions that we seek to answer.   

Islands of explosions in a sea of implosions

The wealth of observational data on supernova light curves, compact object masses, and chemical abundances holds critical clues on how massive stars live and die. However, the utility of these observables were severely hampered due to our limited understanding of the late stages of evolution in massive stars and their explosion mechanism. We address this problem by combining novel insights into their final phases of evolution with the development of a new and efficient method for simulating supernovae through calibrated neutrino-driven explosions. In this talk, I will review some of the most exciting results we have found from the application of this approach to various populations of massive stars, which has profound implications for their final fates, and to the properties of neutron stars and black holes, supernova light curves, and nucleosynthesis produced through their demise. The results provide a natural solution to some of the long standing open problems in astornomy and also challenge some of the conventional views that were held for many decades. I will end the talk by discussing ideas and prospects on using the existing and future gravitational wave measurements to constrain the physics of stellar evolution and supernova explosions.