Jeff Andrews

Abstract: The field of astrophysics is in the midst of a golden age. Between the detection of gravitational waves from over a hundred merging compact objects, the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope which can see galaxies farther away and further back in time than previously before, and the advent of micro-arcsecond astrometry realized by the Gaia space telescope, the pace of discovery has been blistering. In this talk I will discuss how binary stars--pairs of bound, orbiting stars--are one of the threads that weave through each of these topics. In particular, I will introduce our binary population synthesis code, POSYDON, which combines large grids of binary star simulations with machine learning algorithms to produce the next generation of binary population models, and I will describe how my group is using these models to understand a broad range of astrophysical phenomena spanning the local Solar Neighborhood to the cosmological. Finally, I will speculate on the importance of forthcoming observations to constrain key binary evolution processes.