Scientific Seminars

Unveiling the Transient Universe with unprecedented precision using Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Benito Marcote
JIVE

2024-04-09       Merate - OAB Colloquia: sala Belloni + Sala virtuale - https://meet.google.com/ehi-hpit-bzr

The Universe is a dynamic environment filled with transient phenomena of very diverse origin. Thanks to very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) techniques, we can capture the innermost details of these events, enabling a deeper understanding of their origins, emission mechanisms, and broader implications across various scientific domains. In this presentation, I will outline how radio observations conducted with the European VLBI Network (EVN) have revolutionized a large fraction of the transient parameter space. From pinpointing Fast Radio Bursts accurately for the first time, which allowed us to unveil their local environments, to directly measure the expansion of gamma-ray burst and gravitational wave afterglows. Operating at an extraordinary resolution on the scale of milliarcseconds, EVN observations can be used to constrain the emission of these distanct events, but also to unveil the phenomena hapening in our Galaxy. The physical connection between the particle populations responsible for the (very) high energy emission and in the radio domain, allows us to trace the most energetic systems at the highest resolution. We can thus study the inner parts of high energy binary systems (such as colliding wind binaries or gamma-ray binaries) with resolutions that are not accesible in the high-energy regime. This talk will thus show the path that I walked in the last years within the transient sky by exploiting the use of VLBI data in a multiwavelength/multimessenger context.