Physical Society Colloquium

The Life, Death, and Afterlife of GW170817

Daryl Haggard

Department of Physics
McGill University

The neutron star collision, GW170817, resulted in the first ground-breaking joint detection of a gravitational wave source and its electromagnetic counterpart. We recently marked the first anniversary of this exciting multi-messenger discovery -- I will review the year's many new insights derived from this fascinating source, which touch on astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. I will also briefly discuss the advances in instrumentation and multiwavelength coordination that made the discovery and subsequent monitoring possible, as well as our prospects for joint detections of black hole and neutron star mergers by LIGO-Virgo and EM observatories in the coming years.