Astronomy Tea Talk

A key goal in gravitational-wave astronomy is aimed at using the rapidly increasing population of merging black holes (BH) and neutron stars (NS) to learn about the formation, lives, and explosive deaths of the massive stars that formed them. However, this effort requires an increasingly detailed understanding of their evolutionary pathways, which is challenging due to the many uncertainties in the underlying astrophysical modeling of the sources. In this interactive talk I will review the current efforts of simulating BH and NS mergers using population synthesis, discussing the key uncertainties, challenges, and ways forward.