Mini-Symposium: Physics of the Cosmos

The gamma-ray community has been working to compile and condense a list of key science priorities in order to strategically justify investment in technology development for future gamma-ray missions and infrastructure. The gamma-ray band spans as many decades in energy as every other waveband combined. The variety of sources that we study and the physics that goes into our detector development match the breadth of that energy range. We demonstrate that by fulfilling the instrument requirements to study gamma-ray bursts, blazars, and supermassive black hole binaries, we can also study dark matter, pulsars, and diffuse emission with large field of view, large effective area, polarimeter, fast localization, and low latency alert instruments. We also find that the high angular resolution, high energy resolution instrumentation driven by the characterization of nuclear lines is sufficient to also resolve galactic point sources that currently contribute to the diffuse gamma-ray background. We're also excited to highlight partnerships with other wavelengths and messengers to accomplish our core science goals - a better understanding of the extreme environments around compact objects at a variety of scales.