The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science has awarded one million euros to the international collaboration ENGRAVE (Electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources at the Very Large Telescope), of which Susanna Vergani, researcher at LUX, is member of the Executive Committee. The Into Change award recognizes European research groups that have conducted exceptional and innovative studies at the highest international level, while embodying fundamental scientific values such as curiosity, collaboration, and openness. The first edition of the award was given to ENGRAVE in recognition of its groundbreaking discoveries at the intersection of physics, cosmology, and astrophysics, particularly the discovery of the origin of heavy elements in neutron star mergers.
Fundamental questions about the formation of the elements in the periodic table are still open. A major breakthrough happened in 2017 when the collision of two neutron stars was observed for the first time through the emission of gravitational waves and then through the detailed study of the kilonova produced by the explosion. The characteristics of that event demonstrated that neutron star mergers are a source of heavy elements in the Universe.
Aware that they were at the beginning of a new era in astrophysics, in early 2018 the main European groups involved in this area of research joined forces to create the ENGRAVE project, with the goal of coordinating the massive observational resources necessary to capture the rare explosions that trigger the formation of heavy elements, especially using the European Southern Observatory telescopes, but also the Hubble and James Webb telescopes from space.
Promoting interdisciplinary exchange across thirteen European countries (including France) among physicists and astrophysicists, ENGRAVE now operates at the forefront of multi-messenger astrophysics : a rapidly developing field that combines observations of gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation to understand the most extreme events in the universe and the chemical enrichment of the universe.
