The Gravitational Wave Paleontology Lab

Our Lab’s research focuses on Gravitational Wave Paleontology: studying massive stars from their ‘remnants’ as compact object coalescences, with the goal to answer some of the key questions in gravitational-wave astronomy today: How do these gravitational-wave sources form? What can we learn from them about the formation, lives, and explosive deaths of massive stars across cosmic time? How do these sources help to enrich the universe with heavy metals over cosmic time?
When pairs of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars across our vast universe collide, they unleash bursts of gravitational waves that can now be detected on Earth since the first observation of a binary black hole merger in 2015. The detectable properties of these double compact object mergers, like their masses, carry valuable information about the physics of black holes and neutron stars and probe the massive stars that once formed them. These detections open this new frontier of gravitational-wave paleontology. Making the most of these gravitational-wave observations requires comparing the observed properties of the black hole and neutron star mergers, such as their rates, masses, and spins, to theoretical models of their formation pathways. In our lab we address the key bottleneck in this endeavor: the so-called progenitor Uncertainty Challenge: uncertainties within the theoretical models are so large, and the models so computationally expensive, that learning about the underlying fundamental physical processes in massive star evolution from gravitational-wave observations is challenging.