Two seminars on GW source population studies
AGENDA
Thursday 10 September 2026 - 10:30 Thursday 10 September 2026 - 12:00
Conférencier Shanika Galaudage & Alexandre Toubiana
LISA will observe a complex superposition of gravitational-wave signals, with some sources individually resolved and many others contributing to a stochastic foreground. Extracting astrophysical information from these data therefore requires treating these two observables consistently. In this talk, I will present a formalism for LISA population inference that jointly incorporates the stochastic foreground and the resolved-source population. I will highlight how this differs fundamentally from the framework commonly used for LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA and I will illustrate the framework using a mock Global Fit inspired by the Galactic-binary population and show how choices made within the Global Fit propagate directly into astrophysical inference.
Population properties of merging compact binaries with GWTC-5.0 - Shanika Galaudage (NorthWestern U)
The latest LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave catalog, GWTC-5.0, brings the cumulative number of detections to over 300, providing an increasingly detailed view of the compact-binary population. In this talk, I will present updated measurements of the mass, spin, and redshift distributions of merging binary black holes, including correlations between these properties. I will highlight evidence for multiple subpopulations in the data, including rapidly spinning black holes that may be remnants of previous mergers. I will discuss what these emerging structures can tell us about the formation channels of binary black holes and the astrophysics that shapes their population.
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