A study of the agreement between binary neutron star ejecta models derived from numerical relativity simulations

Understand

Neutron star mergers have recently become a tool to study extreme gravity, nucleosynthesis, and the chemical composition of the Universe.

• To date, there has been one joint gravitational and electromagnetic observation of a binary neutron star merger, GW170817, as well as a solely gravitational observation, GW190425.
• In order to accurately identify and interpret electromagnetic signals of neutron star mergers, better models of the matter outflows generated by these mergers are required.
• We compare a series of ejecta models to see where they provide strong constraints on the amount of ejected mass expected from a system, and where systematic uncertainties in current models prevent us from reliably extracting information from observed events.