Gravity Seminars

Amanda Farah, University of Chicago

Title: What the population of gravitational wave sources can do for you

Abstract: The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration’s growing catalog of gravitational wave signals is gradually illuminating the astrophysical population of binary neutron stars and black holes. Features in this population contain information about a wide range of physical phenomena, including the processes that lead to the formation of merging compact objects and the conditions of the universe through which the gravitational waves propagated before reaching earth. It is therefore a powerful tool for understanding the astrophysics of compact object formation, measuring cosmological parameters, and probing the matter distribution between gravitational-wave sources and earth. I will present recent insights into the population of compact object masses inferred from gravitational-wave data and discuss their impacts on each of these topics.

Mikołaj Korzyński, Polish Academy of Sciences