End-to-end study of the home and genealogy of the first binary neutron star merger

Understand

Binary neutron star mergers are one of the ultimate events of massive binary star evolution, and our understanding of their parent system is still in its infancy.

• Upcoming gravitational wave detections, coupled with multi-wavelength follow-up observations, will allow us to study an increasing number of these events by characterising their neighbouring stellar populations and searching for their progenitors.
• Stellar evolution simulations are essential to this work but they are also based on numerous assumptions.
• Additionally, the models used to study the host galaxies differ from those used to characterise the progenitors and are typically based on single star populations.