Gravitational Waves from the Stellar Graveyard

Abstract: 

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has observed hundreds of gravitational-wave sources to date, including mergers between black holes, neutron stars, and mixed neutron star--black holes. These neutron stars and black holes connect many astrophysical puzzles, including the lives and deaths of stars, star cluster dynamics, cosmic chemical enrichment, and the expansion history of the Universe. I will describe some recent astrophysical lessons from gravitational-wave discoveries.

Bio:

Maya is an Assistant Professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), University of Toronto. She is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Previously, she was a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at CIERA, Northwestern University, and before that, she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD under the supervision of Daniel Holz.

Maya's research includes gravitational-wave astronomy and cosmology, black holes, neutron stars, massive stars, transients, large-scale structure and astrostatistics.

Learn More:

• About the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration
• About Gravitational waves
• About Neutron stars

Resources:

• See her University of Toronto faculty page here: U of T Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics | Maya Fishbach Directory All A-Z and her personal website here: Maya Fishbach
• View her presentation: "Listening to Black Holes with Gravitational Waves": Fishbach_KICP20
• Watch her videos:
  • Astrophysics and Cosmology with Black Hole Mergers
  • Black hole astrophysics with gravitational-wave catalogs - IPAM at UCLA
  • Physics of Compact Binary Coalescence (2022)