Prof. Sourav Chatterjee

The discovery of gravitational waves emitted by merger of stellar remnants has brought immense interest in understanding how high-mass single and binary stars evolve, form black holes (and other compact objects), end up in configurations that would merge within the Hubble time, and be detected by the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra and future detectors. I will review the different formation channels for merging compact object binaries. I will focus on the formation of these systems through various dynamical processes and present key results. Finally, I will discuss some of the current outstanding questions and uncertainties and possible avenues to improve our ability to address them.