Prospects for Time-Domain and Multi-Messenger Science with AXIS
Riccardo Arcodia,
Franz E. Bauer,
S. Bradley Cenko,
Kristen C. Dage,
Daryl Haggard,
Wynn C. G. Ho,
Erin Kara,
Michael Koss,
Tingting Liu,
Labani Mallick,
Michela Negro,
Pragati Pradhan,
J. Quirola-Vásquez,
Mark T. Reynolds,
Claudio Ricci,
Richard E. Rothschild,
Navin Sridhar,
Eleonora Troja,
Yuhan Yao
Affiliations
Riccardo Arcodia
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 70 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Franz E. Bauer
Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 8320165, RM, Chile
S. Bradley Cenko
Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
Kristen C. Dage
Department of Physics & Astronomy, Wayne State University, 666 W Hancock St, Detroit, MI 48201, USA
Daryl Haggard
Trottier Space Institute at McGill, 3550 University Street, Montreal, QC H3A 2T8, Canada
Wynn C. G. Ho
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
Erin Kara
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 70 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Michael Koss
Eureka Scientific, 2452 Delmer Street Suite 100, Oakland, CA 94602, USA
Tingting Liu
Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6315, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA
Labani Mallick
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada
Michela Negro
Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
Pragati Pradhan
Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
J. Quirola-Vásquez
Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 8320165, RM, Chile
Mark T. Reynolds
Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
Claudio Ricci
Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Avenida Ejercito Libertador 441, Santiago 8370191, RM, Chile
Richard E. Rothschild
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Navin Sridhar
Cahill Center for Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, MC 249-17, 1200 E California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Eleonora Troja
Department of Physics, University of Rome—Tor Vergata, via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, I-00100 Rome, Italy
Yuhan Yao
Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, 468 Donner Lab, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
The Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) promises revolutionary science in the X-ray and multi-messenger time domain. AXIS will leverage excellent spatial resolution (80× that of Swift), and a large collecting area (5–10× that of Chandra) across a 24-arcmin diameter field of view at soft X-ray energies (0.3–10.0 keV) to discover and characterize a wide range of X-ray transients from supernova-shock breakouts to tidal disruption events to highly variable supermassive black holes. The observatory’s ability to localize and monitor faint X-ray sources opens up new opportunities to hunt for counterparts to distant binary neutron star mergers, fast radio bursts, and exotic phenomena like fast X-ray transients. AXIS will offer a response time of <2 h to community alerts, enabling studies of gravitational wave sources, high-energy neutrino emitters, X-ray binaries, magnetars, and other targets of opportunity. This white paper highlights some of the discovery science that will be driven by AXIS in this burgeoning field of time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics. This White Paper is part of a series commissioned for the AXIS Probe Concept Mission; additional AXIS White Papers can be found at the AXIS website.
