Professor Jeff Andrews- University of Florida

Title: It takes Two to Tango: How Binary Stars Evolve into Gravitational Wave Sources

Despite the discovery of nearly a hundred merging black holes and neutron stars by gravitational wave observatories in recent years, significant uncertainties remain regarding these systems’ formation. With the upcoming third LIGO-Virgo observing run, the study of these objects has taken on a new urgency. In this talk I will discuss how we can make progress on two fronts. First, I will describe how new approaches to modeling binary star populations are already qualitatively and quantitatively improving our understanding of how binary stars evolve in isolation. Second, I will argue that observed populations of neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way, including recent detections of astrometric binaries by the Gaia satellite, place critical constraints on supernova physics.