Speaker
Description
The huge luminosity, redshift distribution extending to $z > 9$ and association with the explosive death of very massive stars make long GRBs uniquely powerful cosmic beacons to unveil and characterize the bulk population of low mass / lumninosity primordial galaxies, assess star formation rate evolution up to the first generation of stars (pop–III), shed light on the sources and evolution of cosmic reionization. At the same time,the Ep,i - Eiso ("Amati") and other correlations between prompt and early afterglow emission of GRBs are intensively used for measuring the expansion rate and geometry of the Universe, investigating the nature and evolution of ”dark energy” and testing non-standard cosmological models. Finally, short GRBs produced by the merging of NS-NS and NS-BH systems, sources of Gravitational Wave signals, are a key phenomenon for enabling multi-messenger cosmology. I will shortly review the status and perspectives of this very hot research field, including the Swift cornerstone contributions and the expected performances of space mission projects, like THESEUS, aiming at fully exploiting the potentialities of the GRB phenomenon for cosmology in synergy with the large e.m. (e.g., ELT, TMT, SKA, CTA, NewATHENA) and multi-messenger (e.g., ET, CE, Km3NET) facilities of the future.
