WST will provide an unprecedented spectroscopic characterization of transient and timevariable phenomena. Time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy are key priorities identified by major planning exercises, such as the Astro2020 decadal survey, and they are tightly connected since multi-messenger events are typically of a transient nature.
WST
is being conceived with a time-domain mindset, to enable maximum operational
flexibility and rapid data processing in order to serve the needs of this
exciting and diverse field full of serendipitous discovery potential, with science cases spanning all physical scales from Solar system objects to Cosmology and all-time scales from hours to decades. In addition to finding hitherto unknown categories of variable events thereby revealing new astrophysical processes, WST can make huge progress in the revolution of exploiting sources of gravitational waves (GWs). WST’s IFS and MOS will collect low-resolution spectra of up to 10,000 transient phenomena every night, including supernovae (SNe), active galactic nuclei, tidal disruption events (TDEs), gamma-ray-bursts (GRBs), and fast radio bursts (FRBs), among others. Serendipitous transient observations at random phase will be collected while surveying distant galaxies, while intentional observations will be taken in response to alert brokers (e.g., Rubin/LSST).
