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.
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 (minus that 1.5 arcsec),
sensitivity (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
minus that 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.