University of Arizona, Theoretical Astrophysics Program (TAP) Colloquia Series
TITLE
Gravitational Wave Paleontology: A New Frontier to Explore the Formation, Lives, and Deaths of Stars to the Edge of our Observable Universe
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, pushing the reach
of gravitational-wave astronomy to the edge of the observable universe. Most excitingly,
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”. I will discuss how we can overcome
this challenge and make discoveries about the formation and lives of massive stars across
cosmic time from gravitational waves.
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. Additionally, she focuses on implementing AI in
gravitational-wave astronomy.
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