AST Colloquium: ‘Gravitational Wave Paleontology’: a New Frontier to Explore the Formation, Lives, and Deaths of Stars to the Edge of our Observable Universe

AST Colloquium
‘Gravitational Wave Paleontology’: a New Frontier to Explore the Formation, Lives, and Deaths of Stars to the Edge of our Observable Universe

Dr. Floor Broekgaarden
Junior Fellow, Simons Society of Fellows
Columbia University

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Abstract:
We are on the precipice of the Big Data gravitational wave era. Pairs of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars across the universe occasionally merge, unleashing bursts of gravitational waves that can now be detected on Earth. Over the next few years, the population of detected mergers will rapidly increase from about a hundred today to millions of detections per year as new observing runs and next-generation detectors provide data with ever-increasing precision and to larger distances. This wealth of data will provide an unprecedented probe of the physics of black holes and neutron stars, and of the evolution of the binary massive stars that formed them. This will open the new frontier of `gravitational-wave paleontology’: studying massive stars and binary evolution from their `remnant' compact object mergers, with the goal of answering some of the biggest open questions in astrophysics 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? In this talk, I will outline the recent developments in this field, including the main bottleneck: the "Progenitor Uncertainty Challenge".

Speaker Bio:
Floor Broekgaarden is a Junior Fellow in the Simons Society of Fellows hosted at Columbia University. She completed a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Amsterdam in 2017, and obtained her PhD in astrophysics from Harvard in 2023, during which she held a NASA FINESST fellowship and was a Harvard Horizons Scholar. Floor is also currently a Research Professor in the William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University where she will start full-time as an Assistant Professor by July 2025. Her research focuses on “gravitational-wave paleontology”: using the collisions of black holes and neutron stars observed with gravitational waves to probe the formation, lives, and deaths of massive stars across cosmic time. She additionally focuses on implementing AI in gravitational-wave astronomy.

Intended Audience:
Beginners, undergraduates, graduates, experts. Those with interest in the topic.

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