Gravitational wave progenitors near and far

IAP weekly specialised seminars / Friday 22 January 2021:
Astrid Lamberts, Obs. Côte d'Azur (OCA) (Nice, France)

Gravitational waves (GW) have opened a new window on our universe, providing us unique information on fundamental physics, stellar evolution, high energy astrophysics and global star formation in the universe. As the first catalogs of GW events observed by LIGO/Virgo has become available, the main question is "where do black hole mergers come from ?" In this talk I will detail in which types of environments progenitors stars of GW events typically form and how the properties of GW events can inform on binary evolution. I will first focus on the mass black holes observed by LIGO/Virgo before presenting predictions for space-based GW detector LISA. LISA will be a detector operating at lower frequencies and will be sensitive to stellar binaries in the Milky Way from compact objects such as white dwarfs or black holes but also "living" stars which will be powerful multi messenger sources.