Title: From Cradle to Grave: Interpreting the Extraordinary Lives of Neutron Stars through Multimessenger Observations
Neutron stars are among the most extraordinary objects in the Universe. Born in the aftermath of stellar collapse, they broadcast their structure across nearly every messenger we can detect and end in mergers thought to forge a significant fraction of the heavy elements. They are also one of the only places in nature where all four fundamental interactions compete, placing them at the intersection of nuclear physics, general relativity, and cosmology. In this talk, I will follow neutron stars from cradle to grave. I will begin with short gamma-ray bursts and what their host galaxies reveal about the time binary neutron stars take to merge. I will then turn to the mergers themselves, where the material ejected depends on the properties of each system and shapes the multimessenger transients we observe. Together, these pieces are essential to making sense of the r-process abundances we measure, the gravitational waves we detect, and the many other direct and indirect observations of neutron star systems and their mergers.
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