Multi-messenger EOS constraints using binary NS mergers

Abstract

Though nearly five decades in the making, the opening mark of gravitational wave (GW) astronomy has only just now sounded. This novel field holds great scientific promise in the upcoming years, and yet already with a single binary NS merger event — it has managed to deliver results beyond our hopes and expectations. A primary factor in this success is the fact that this first binary NS merger, GW170817, was successfully followed up and detected in wavelengths spanning the observable electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. This ‘multi-messenger’ view of binary NS mergers opens new windows of opportunity for maximizing the scientific return from these events, and has facilitated constraints on physics ranging from cosmology, to general relativity, and nuclear physics. In the following I review constraints on the equation of state (EOS) of dense nuclear matter which can be obtained from multi-messenger analyses of binary NS mergers, showing that these are complementary to alternative approaches of constraining the EOS using GW data alone, and summarizing the main results arising from GW170817.