Sanika Khadkikar

Neutron stars are among the most extraordinary objects in the Universe, formed in the aftermath of stellar collapse, evolving through lives that broadcast their internal structure across almost every messenger we can detect, and dying in mergers expected to be responsible for the production of a significant fraction of heavy elements in the Universe. In this talk, I follow them from their cradle to their grave, examining the imprints of their internal properties, including temperature, rotation, composition, and the possible presence of dark matter, strange matter, or deconfined quark matter, on observable signatures across electromagnetic and gravitational wave channels throughout their lives. I will discuss the inherent degeneracies among these signatures that complicate efforts to infer the underlying microphysics, and present strategies for bias-aware, systematically robust inference aimed at deconvolving these effects. Using this framework, I aim to consistently connect gravitational wave measurements to electromagnetic observations, working towards a unified multi-messenger picture of neutron star interiors and heavy-element production in the Universe.

Credit: NASA/Swift/Dana Berry